Going strictly by the numbers, those who are rocking their email through Yahoo have a lower credit score than, say, Gmail users. In fact, according to Credit Karma, an online credit checking service, Yahoo email users tend to have the worst credit of all.

Credit Karma combed through its database and ranked the average credit score by email provider. For what it's worth, BellSouth and Comcast took the top two spots with the highest credit scores, while Gmail came in third with an average score over 680. Then it dips down, with MSN, Hotmail, and AOL taking the next three spots with an average credit score of 665 or less.

The rankings are based on credit scores from 20,000 users, so the sample size is arguably enough not to skew the results. So then the question raised is why the disparity? Credit Karma didn't say. Maybe Yahoo's spam filters trail the competition, or as Mashable.com surmises, maybe the lower ranked email addys represent a younger audience.

We don't have the answer, but we'd like to hear your theories. Hit the jump and sound off!

We can't think of a ton of reasons to want to leave Gmail behind, but should you decide to do your emailing elsewhere, the search giant wants to make it easy for you to take your data with you.

Working towards that goal is a small team of Google Chicago engineers who make up Google's Data Liberation Front. Just as it sounds, the team's mission is to liberate personal user data so that it can be easily transferred into and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions.'

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once," Google wrote in a blog entry. "We believe that users -- not products -- own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle."

In addition to "already liberated" Google products, such as the company's blogging platform Blogger and email service Gmail, the team also plans to do the same for Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export) in the coming months.