A new form of prejudice: email domain snobbery

It seems that it is acceptible now to look down on people who don’t use Gmail as their prime email account: swissmiss | What your email domain says about you. As someone who has been using email since 1983 — well before the Interwebs, as the cool kids like to say — I must say this is totally ridiculous. I’ve used various forms of email over time, from internal IBM email to Yahoo! to Hotmail to Gmail and some others that have come and gone. I have stuck with Yahoo! because I have had my account there for along time and I am not keen on Gmail. I was happy Gmail came along: it forced Yahoo! to bump up their size limits and get competitive. But I am also a fan of Yahoo! in general. Gmail/Google fans are like Apple fans: they swear how great it is and are happy to overlook any deficiencies (like those recent thousands of Gmail accounts that recently disappeared). All online web services have their shortcomings, but to somehow assume that people are inferior because they use one form of email over another is terrible. It’s not the most terrible prejudice in the world, but it is still prejudice.