Your email address can affect your motor premium

Car insurance will cost you more if you have a Hotmail account, according to The Sun.

Research on comparison sites by the newspaper showed that quotes for customers with Hotmail accounts were higher than quotes for customers with Gmail accounts. All other details were the same.

You’ll also pay more if your name is Mohammad, The Sun discovered.

Enquiries via Hotmail saw quotes up to £31.36 costlier than those made via Gmail.

Among the biggest price gaps was Admiral, which told The Sun that email domains affect risk determinations, saying: “Certain domain names are associated with more accidents than others.”

On aggregator GoCompare.com, Admiral charged a Hotmail driver £467.04 and a Gmail one £435.68 £31.36 less. That gap was narrower on Monesupermarket.com, where the Admiral quote was £507.21, the Hotmail quote was £6.57 dearer than Gmail. Admiral offered a £380.80 premium to a Hotmail user on Confused.com, using Gmail cost £.5.60 less.

The Sun also compared quotes for customers named Mohammed versus John and found Mohammed was quoted higher premiums by Admiral, Marks & Spencer, Bell, Elephant and Diamond.

Once again, Admiral showed the biggest gap. For a 2007 Ford Focus in Leicester, Admiral quoted £1,333 for John Smith and £2,252 for Mohammed Ali - £919 more. All details were identical apart from the name, The Sun said.

Admiral chief executive David Stevens said the firm’s anti-fraud software was designed to identify “where inaccurate details are entered or implausibly changed”.

M&S said it “did not discriminate” and would probe the claims.

“M&S Bank does not discriminate under any circumstances and a customer’s name or ethnicity has absolutely no impact on their insurance premium. We provided identical quotes in all cases where the scenarios for the two customers were exactly the same. Where there were differences in the scenario, there was a variance in price, this wasn’t a result of the customer’s name.”