Managing your email... 1 account? 2 accounts? 3?

[idea]

After years and years of procrastinating I finally registered my own domain, got it hosted, and set me up an IMAP/webmail account. Before I start changing my registered email address on all of my websites, I wanted to know if I should add another account. I'd keep 1 for personal/forum use, and another for billing/credit card/purchases.

How do you guys do it?

 

[Cuda1447]

Hotmail.com for life. Ive had it for about 5 years, hasn't done me wrong yet. I see no reason to switch.

 

[Steve]

Hotmail for seven years, Yahoo for three, two Gmails and my work for one.

 

[DeviousTrap]

I use a catch all address and make a random address for any site that I type my email into (in addition to my eric@ standard one). That way I can trace how someone got my email address.

 

[Xyo II]

I have 5 hotmail accounts. One personal, one for billing/shipping notices, one for newsletters, one for spam that I would get otherwise (when you have to give your email for something you want to buy or something like that) and one for whatever.

 

[Toonces]

hotmail for 7 years, gmail more recently, and my university email forwarded to both

 

[idea]

Wow look at all the hotmail users... I wouldn't use hotmail just because its so common. I wanted a more personal domain.

You guys have way too many email addresses... how do you keep track??

 

[Injury]

If you're going to create a domain, here is the best plan, AFAIC:


Personal Account: Correspondance between friends, family, etc. Don't post it, don't write it out on your webpage (spam bots can pick it up.)

Crap Account: Used for signing up for forums and sites that may potentially spam you. Mailing lists and crap you may not check regularly, and general bullcrap. Set this up in outlook and have it clean itself out every week or so. Anything worth looking at, you can forward to the personal account without the risk of someone getting your email address.

Professional/Business account: Don't give this to anyone. Use it only for important things like billing/credit cards and professional/critical correspondance. Could be the same as personal, depends on how much sensative information you have. The idea here is that you can leave spam filters off on this one so nothing imporant gets deleted.

Admin account: The one you have for contact information about the domain and the one you give out on a website. Expect spam, use spam filters. Use this one for the domain registration, etc.


Don't bother checking the crap account unless you are watching for something. The personal one is the one you'd check regularly and the business/admin would be checked once a day at best.

 

[George P Burdell]

1. personal domain, main email address for everything EXCEPT web hosting.
2. 1 gmail account, for all my webhosting use (if my webhosting goes down, i doubt #1 will work) and for junk signups.
3. 2 diff college accounts. these are usually restricted to official school business.
4. sometimes email at work. I don't work all year round (student), so email at work isn't much of a headache. semesters when I'm not wirking, this forwards to #1.
5. crappy msn.com address that's been in use for years. too much spam here. trying to move everything from here to gmail.

 

[oddyager]

Home email from my ISP for personal and online purchases, Yahoo account for forum/site registrations (switched to gmail last year), and college email that's currently forwarding to my home email... and then there is my work email.

 

[idea]

I set it up.

1 for each...
Personal
Internet/Forum accounts
"jsmith" style for business accounts like credit cards, etc billers
Junk mail
and Internet purchases

I think that will cover it. The only important one I need to check all the time is my personal one.

 

[Exsomnis]

I was using a Gmail account for the longest time, now I'm using one of the inboxes supplied by my ISP.

 

[Train]

I have 8 accounts total in my outlook, one for work, one personal, one for billing, and one admin for each of the domains I have.

 

[Swag1138]

I've had my yahoo mail account since they were offering yahoo mail accounts. I use that for pretty much any kind of offer or forum or anything like that. I use my gmail for anything really important.

 

[morkus64]

I've got 1 yahoo, 1 school and 4 gmail.... i use forwarding to make disposable filters basically... only individuals i know get the real address, buisnesses get a different address that i can terminate when it gets to spammy... then i have one for work, one for school, one for things that will obviously spam me.

 

[IronWing]

For website inquiries: Set up form mail of some sort in order to shield your email address from spambots. Hardwire the script to send email to a designated mailbox so the form can't be hijacked and also to sanitize messages.

For forums and other online exposure: Use an email address that reflects the forum name: atot@mysite.com. Any spam will come to your domain's catchall mailbox and you can figure out where spammers are getting your address.

 

[n7]

I like my Gmail account...

 

[GeekDrew]

1 mailbox for mailing lists.
1 mailbox for mailing lists that are *cough* sensitive.
1 mailbox for everything else: general correspondance, website subscriptions, etc.

and I have 1 mailbox @gmail for attachments and friends to use, but I only check it when someone tells me to do so.

I used to have several different mailboxes for "everything else" - one for my domain (geekdrew.net) registration (admin@), one for general use (drew@), one for website registrations (public@), and others. I decided that I was getting a sufficiently low quantity of e-mail that I'd rather just see everything in one mailbox (since that's what I eventually had Thunderbird do anyway), and that the other accounts were just overkill. So I dropped the other accounts, and put forwarders on them, to my general account.

<edit>

Also, used the catchall method, creating unique addresses, such as atot@, for about a day. I then decided that it *really* wasn't worth the hassle, and would probably come back to haunt me, if I ever needed my password reset, and couldn't remember what e-mail address I had registered with.

 

[The Green Bean]

Ive got one yahoo for 6 years
Own domain for 2 and gmail for 1 ...Use all of them

 

[dionx]

1 work - Outlook while on-site, webmail access when off-site
1 gmail - mainly webmail access, but occassionally POP3 it when i want to sync it with my PDA
1 personal domain - i forward this to my gmail because i hate the domain webmail application
1 spam account

 

[Mo0o]

1 gmail
1 school
1 junk

 

[moshquerade]

1 Roadrunner
1 gmail
1 hotmail
3 yahoos

 

[Nocturnal]

I just use my ISP and my domain e-mails.

 

[randomlinh]

fastmail.fm hosts all my email. have my main email (at my own domain) hosted on their mx servers. have a random junk email i use for registering stuff.. funnels there too. my google accounts and work account also foward there, google which I don't really use, just have. the nice thing about the junk email.. i can have me@domain.com... junk1@me.domain.com, junk2@me.domain.com, etc, etc... and can easily filter from there.

 

[eplebnista]

I have 4 that I use for different purposes, all using my ISP.