What Your Email Provider With Profiling Says About YOU

I ran across a fascinating article from Hunch in the news, never heard of them, but apparently they did web research on its users of web applications on the characteristics of the senders of email from the four main web mail providers (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail). It is kind of like criminal profiling by police where they say depending on which service you use they can tell who you are.

Don't take offense if you don't fit the EXACT profile, I am just the messenger here, and remember they are averaging ALL the users of one service down to a single profile. Just look at the trending. For what it's worth....

• Women
• Ages between 35-64
• Probably overweight (how do they know that??? LOL)
• Education - high school diploma
• Spiritual but not religious
• Political - Moderate
• Romantic relationship more than ten years
• No children
• Surburbanite
• Travel a lot but NOT outside the country
• Priority for them is the family (with no children??)
• Read magazines, have a computer (duh)
• Listen to radio and watch a lot of television
• Extroverted
• Optimistic
• Like to work and be part of a team

• Younger people ages 18-34
• Mostly men, thin men
• University education
• Not religious, agnostic
• Politics toward the left
• City dwellers
• No children (ha ha maybe this computer thing is bad socially)
• Also travel a lot
• Minimum five countries visited by all these users
• Most interested in their "career"
• Tech savvy, know the web well, read blogs, probably have iPhone
• Use laptop computers and listen to MP3 musci
• Dress is casual, jeans and t-shirts
• Introverted
• Partial to salty snacks

• Young women age 18-34
• Medium build
• High school diploma
• Not religious
• Politics - do not care much about that but are moderates
• Again single, and childless (Ha Ha I am seeing a correlation with too much emailing)
• Another suburban dweller, but now live with parents
• Love to travel
• Read magazines
• Also have laptops and listen to MP3 music
• Pessimistic of the bunch (probably has to do with aligning with Microsoft and all the bugs that company puts in the software)
• Introverted
• Loves teamwork

• Another older group from 18 but ranging to 49
• Tend to be overweight women (remember this is an average)
• High school diploma
• Not religious but interested in defining spirituality
• As far as their political leanings, moderate
• Are in a loving relationship
• This group has kids
• They live in the suburbs OR rural areas
• Have not traveled outside the country
• Family is priority (at least that makes sense with the children part)
• Types of magazines they read - Entertainment
• Have a computer, listen to the radio, and play music off CDs
• They watch a lot of television
• Outgoing
• Enjoy working in teams
• They like sweets (maybe accounts for the overweight part)

So the Gmailers are the techie types, the Yahoo ones are the ones with sweet tooths. The AOL crowd seems to have been the oldest crowd. I find it interesting that any organization has time on their hands like this to do this study. And WHAT IF you use multiple providers? Do you have a split personality? If you use none of these email systems I guess you are just extremely individualistic and fly under the radar from the masses.

But if you think of email with all the time you spend on it, less than breathing but probably more than eating Hunch might just be on to something with their profiling. At least it's a hunch. LOL.