Does Using Yahoo Mail Lower Your Credit Score?

Yahoo Mail just announced its first redesign in five years and it took the tech community 20 hours to notice. Meanwhile Aol Mail went down last week without making a sound. Imagine the echo chamber uproar if either had happened to Gmail.

So if we’re not using Aol and Yahoo, who is?

People with low credit scores according to Credit Karma. While the above chart doesn’t mean that changing your @gmail.com address to a @yahoo.com or an @aol.com will actually lower your score, it is showing that for one reason or another people that who use Yahoo Mail tend to score lower on their FICO analysis.

From Credit Karma:

“Certainly switching email providers will not increase or decrease your credit score. It’s more the case that people with a certain score have a greater likeliness to use a particular email provider. Why this happens is probably due to some demographic skew which then carries to the email domain.”

Of all the mail service providers, Yahoo definitely has the most users at 94.6 million uniques a month. In terms of user age, our parent company Aol’s Aol Mail skews most heavily toward the 65+ age range (!), while Yahoo skews between 35-44, Hotmail 25-34 and Gmail the same at 25-34 according to comScore.

In terms of household income, Yahoo Mail users are skewing towards the under $15k income bracket when compared to the rest of the Internet, despite the fact that a majority of users are in the $40K to $60K range.

Perhaps the fact that people who make less money (because they’re students or other people with no income) are overrepresented on dominant email provider Yahoo Mail might shed some light on the Credit Karma statistics?

In any case, you can add this to the pile of  “What Your Email Address Says About You” posts. And, in this case, it says you’ve got bad credit.