The Hotmail effect
25th October, 2025
A plumber drove past me last week with a Hotmail email address painted proudly on the back of his van.
No logo. No tagline. No QR code. Just “Plumbing Services”, and an email address that probably hasn’t changed since Windows XP was still popular.
For most of my career, that might have been all I needed to dismiss them. Probably unprofessional. Probably unsophisticated. Probably cash-in-hand. The kind of person who might install your sink backwards, and vanish with your money.
We used to treat things like that as red flags. If you looked unpolished, you were unprofessional. That was the rule.
And those assumptions didn’t come from nowhere – we engineered them. An entire generation of marketers trained businesses to look the part. We told them that trust was a design problem. That confidence could be manufactured. Custom domains. Grid-aligned logos. Friendly sans-serifs and a reassuring tone of voice. We built an industry around polish and convinced ourselves that polish was proof of competence.
But maybe that plumber’s Hotmail address is saying something else.
A human signal
Because in today’s web – a place that somehow manages to be both over-designed and under-built – a Hotmail address might be the last surviving signal of authenticity.
Most of what we see online now tries to look perfect. It tries to read smoothly, to feel effortless, to remove any friction that might interrupt the illusion. But most of it’s bad. Heavy. Slow. Repetitive. Polished in all the wrong ways.
We’ve built an internet that performs competence without actually being competent.
That van doesn’t need a strategist or a brand guide. It doesn’t need a content calendar or a generative workflow. It’s probably been trading under that same email for twenty years – longer than most marketing agencies survive.
And maybe that’s the point. In a world of synthetic competence – of things that mimic expertise without ever having earned it – the rough edges start to look like proof of life.
Because when everything looks professional, nothing feels human. Every brand, every website, every social feed has been tuned into the same glossy template. Perfect kerning, soft gradients, human-but-not-too-human copy. It’s all clean, confident, and hollow.
We’ve flattened meaning into usability. The same design systems, tone guides, and “authentic” stock photography make everything look trustworthy – and therefore suspicious.
It’s the uncanny valley of professionalism: the closer brands get to looking right, the less we might believe them.
The economy of imperfection
So authenticity becomes the next luxury good.
We start to crave friction. We look for cracks – the typos, the unfiltered moments, the signs of human hands. The emails from Hotmail accounts.
And as soon as that desire exists, someone finds a way to monetise it. The aesthetic of imperfection becomes an asset class.
You can see it everywhere now: “shot on iPhone” campaigns, lo-fi ads pretending to be user-generated content, influencers performing spontaneity with agency scripts and lighting rigs.
It’s a full-blown economy of imperfection, and it’s growing fast. The market has discovered that the easiest way to look real is to fake it badly.
The collapse of signal hierarchies
This is what happens when authenticity itself becomes synthetic.
Every signal that once conveyed truth – professionalism, polish, imperfection – can now be generated, packaged, and optimised.
We can fake competence. We can fake vulnerability. We can fake sincerity.
And when everything can be faked, the signals stop working. Meaning collapses into noise.
That’s the broader story of the synthetic web – a world where provenance has evaporated, and where all signals eventually blur into the same static.
The algorithmic loop of trust
Social media has made this worse.
Platforms are teaching us what “authentic” looks like. They amplify the content that triggers trust – the handheld shot, the stuttered delivery, the rough edge. Creators imitate what performs well. The algorithm learns from that imitation.
Authenticity becomes a closed loop, refined and replicated until it’s indistinguishable from the thing it imitates.
We’ve turned seeming human into a pattern that machines can optimise.
The uncanny mirror
That’s the bit that gets under my skin.
Maybe the plumber with the Hotmail address isn’t a relic at all. Maybe he’s the last authentic node in a network that’s otherwise been wrapped in artificial sincerity.
He’s not optimised. He’s not A/B‑tested. He’s just there. Still trading. Still human.
And maybe that’s why he stands out.
Once, a Hotmail address meant amateur hour. Now, it might mean I’m still real. Or maybe it’s just another costume – the next iteration of authenticity theatre. After all, businesses (and their vans, and their email addresses) can certainly just be bought.
Either way, the lesson’s the same. Real things age. They rust, wear down, and carry their history with them. That’s what makes them trustworthy.
And the most convincing thing you can be might just be imperfect.
I agreed and love the authentic things about not being too perfect. But still it’s a horrible email address but you are right on the it’s unlikely to be a spammer or a fly by night operation.
And this is why my personal site looks amateurish 😊
👏
I have developed my website using Bootstrap, and hand coded using HTML > looks presentable but not very slick
Anti-design is a design decision!