7mo ago

How many email addresses do you have?

I've recently been working to minimize my email clutter, my dependance on certain email providers, and to consolidate services under certain accounts.

I'm down to the following uses:
Apple ID, mydomain-billing/subscriptions, mydomain-official/legal, anon, friends/family, business domain.

I also have a handful of aliases and an account just for newsletters and my RSS app.

I'm curious if others have several email addresses for similar uses or if you use your email client to categorize incoming messages for you. For people who only have one email address, how do you manage this?

64 comments

i use a different address for almost every destination, all aliasing from a main domain. in this way i can track who sells my info.
- any notable surprises you care to shame?
  
  Not OP but Under Armor sells your shit instantly in my experience. I’ve got the same setup and just turn the address off after I get my order. I must have got forwarded 2-3 spam things a day before I killed it.
  
  I do the same thing with email aliases and I’ve deactivated just two in the years I’ve been doing it.
  One the comes to mind is Scentbird, they get hacked like every month because they’re on some shitty Wordpress server so they unintentionally leak your data all the time.
  
  I do this same thing with unique email addresses recipients when I have to give out an email address. My "wall of shame" email sellers/hacked companies includes:
  eharmony.com
  parkmobile.com
  000webhost.com
  honarable mention for eventbrite.com
  
  honestly, nothing to really report. this could be confirmation bias as i tend to avoid the problem actors( the facebooks, the fly-by-night vendors), but I have yet to see any egregious address-sharing in the last several years.
  i still get quite a bit if spam from places that used to broadcast email addresses on their sites like early versions of the SETI distributed processing project
  
  Kickstarter are the ones for me - I get spam unrelated to any projects I’ve backed, so somehow they got hold of that address…
- Pretty much why I'm glad I switched to Proton. They came out with Proton Pass, which includes aliasing, and I haven't looked back. So far, I haven't had any leak. However, I have come up against one, some shop service used by some companies, such as Vessi and CrunchLab. It uses the email address you put in with the first company you bought from. Kind of annoying but not deal breaking.

I have multiple domains and backup addresses on ProtonMail, so technically I have infinite addresses :P
I split mails domains at the identity level, and addresses (under my custom domains, for proton I use their simplelogin integration) are split between services, even though I use my main one in most places still.
- This made me laugh. You must be a blast at parties!
  
  :P
- same.
  s/proton/tuta/
  
  You forgot to disable case sensitivity

Three:
Professional: first.last@domain.com
Register for bullshit e-mail: herpaderp@domain.com
The 16 year old me e-mail with a 69 in it that i still inexplicably use occassionally.
- ...nice.

I only have one email address from ProtonMail but I make extensive use of their "Additional Addresses" feature and I use ProtonPass email aliases. There are only a few sites which know my real email address (around 15 I think).
Edit: technically I also have a Gmail address but I'm trying to get rid of that since it has my deadname in it.
- Non-gender specific Bruh, what you mean try? Just do it!
  
  Meaning I'm in the process of doing it and almost finished.

Two.
One "official" with my name attached to it and one "trash" for places I don't want to give any real data to.

3 real adresses: personal, professional, school assigned. Countless aliasses

I use two actively but technically I have a gmail adress but only use it to log in to YouTube with it. If you sent me an email there I will probably never see it.

3 mailboxes
Work
Personal (general use)
Personal (Important personal stuff)
That last email is for things I don’t want to risk reading in public. It’s the one I give to my doctor, financial advisor, insurance, tax authority, etc.

I have a wildcard rule set up to catch things sent to addresses on my domain that I don’t have explicitly configured… so technically, I have infinite email addresses.
- Me too. I use myname+theirname@domain.tld for almost everything. Not only I can have many mynames, I also can have very many theirnames.
  
  Also makes it relatively easy to see who leaked your data.

I counted 11 across 3 different providers.
1 in Aol mail
3 in Google Mail
7 in InstAddr

Work, gmail with a regrettable name i picked in my teens and can't be bothered to migrate away from. Other gmail that I only have on my phone. Work mail, personal mai with firstname@uniquesurname

I have a "professional" email with my real name and one with my "online" name. They used to both be on gmail but now they are on Protonmail.
I also have some domain names I own which I can set up with Protonmail as the provider... Kinda tempted to move everything over to my domain so that I can switch providers if I need to without having to update things.

I have one paid email address that’s my main that I purchased from an overseas provider, just to complicate spying and reduce perverse motivations to use my data to profit.
I have a secondary older email address, a professional work email address, and then a long tail of anti-spam aliases.

too many

One real (actively used) email address on Proton Mail, 300 aliases on SimpleLogin and addy.io

I made a bunch of burner Google accounts back when it was easy to do so so I have many addresses from there + a couple in protonmail. In total it should be 2 "serious" addresses, 1 for games and non-serious services, 2-3 for some specialized stuff and about 8(?) dummy accounts, some of which have connected accounts to social media which have been locked.

One private
One professional-private (which is an alias to my private one)
One work email

I daily use 4, plus some temporary

I use about 200 junkmail addresses when I am testing online services with registration.

One per site.
- You mean temp mail?
  
  What do you mean?

Mostly six: family and friends, romantic relationships, professional, online identity, signing to Google services, signing to other services.
I say "mostly" because I went through dozens of addresses, already abandoned. And the "signing to other services" e-mail has disposable addresses, that I use fairly often.
I use this as a way to limit what Alphabet knows about me, given that it's the biggest data vulture that I can't get rid of.

About 160

I create unique email addresses for every organisation and service I deal with, including an obfuscated date, so when an address is compromised I can nuke it with a hard rejection, and regenerate as needed. This all feeds into a catchall mailbox, with server-side sieve rules to filter the stuff I actually care about.
I besides some account specific and burnt addresses, I don’t actively track of any of the addresses I’ve created, it would be in the hundreds by now.
One benefit of this crazy setup is there’s one less common identifier to match across disparate data stores.
Finally, no one should do any of The above. From experience I consider it pathological.
- i started to create separate email aliases for every newsletter, account and contact like >10years ago. i still have some few aliases that i shared with friends so these are spread more wide. some of these aliases turned out to be useful as in the platform i created it for lost my data, i got some phishing mail and told the platform admins about their data loss, i then just stopped spam by changing that one single email alias. that happened i think four times.
  this year i wanted to get rid of old domains and had to go through all of the aliases there, which turned out to be >400, that was a lot of work, but my setup turned out to be quite a good documentation about what accounts i've set up during that period. some accounts were for platforms that do not exist any more, many for platforms that changed owner (mostly without notice) while some accounts turned out to be stuck like i cannot even delete them, because if i try, that platform freezes the account for "weird looking actions" looks like they just do not want to follow the laws.
  overall i think of maybe improving usability by platforms, (free)email providers and also newsletter senders, then creating some specs and try writing RFC style definitions and write a proof-of-concept to make "handshake" and email addresschanges possible and easy for endusers in large scale while achieving the same level of filterless spam protection that i have now.
  when i find the time to do it.

Dozens, but they all converge into 2 mailboxes. It's nice to keep things separate, but it does get confusing sometimes. If I didn't have a password manager to remember my logins, it would be untenable.
For stuff I'm going to use long terms i use my lifetime university email address which forwards to me main fastmail address. I have several fastmail addresses for dev stuff, bacon (not quite spam), one for patreon and kickstarter, and so on. Those all go to one mailbox.
My old gmail account is just for spam, google's account spam, and (I only recently noticed) github. I check that mailbox like 3 times a year.
Also all my domains have at least an info address that forwards to my dev fastmail address, and we have a household group address that forwards to my fastmail as well.

I had 2 main ones, but they also got emails from one of my old accounts, for technically 3. But I just moved to Proton mail, so now I'm trying to stick with one + aliases. I'm hoping to keep it this way 😤
- How do you like it? I was thinking of going that route, especially with their Easy Switch tool.
  
  I actually really like it! It's much more organized and I don't feel overwhelmed having to look through and remember different accounts. And the alias feature has been amazing. Much simpler than making a temp email address. Setting it up wasn't bad and they walk you through forwarding and all that stuff. I had 2-3 Gmail accounts before the switch and I honestly won't go back, even if Proton vanished tomorrow.

Two. One main catchall, one backup / burner. Both on Proton Mail.

Two. One address is professionaly I use it only at work on my work computer.
Another private address at mailbox.org, where I can temporarily (or permanently) make up to 25 "sub-addresses" that get routed to my main address.
I have 3 in use with the suffix myname-shop@mailbox.org, myname-newsletter@mailbox.org and myname-trash@mailbox.org.
Usually I just google for any 10 minute mail service and use those addresses.

Basically infinite, as I also have the catchall account of my domain.

10 that I know of.
- Genghis Khan.

Right now, a bit over 410 email addresses. Almost all of them are my simplelogin aliases. That leaves the protonmail addresses and the one gmail I created but never used because I use only if it's a form or something I can only fill out once the owner forgets to open it up to everybody that doesn't have a google account.

$dayjob gave me an email, but they are the only ones that use it. My primary is a GMail, though I really should switch to a less crappy provider. I run my own mail server, all my GMail is just forwarded there, but it's not my primary because too many people were having problems sending or receiving mail though there.
So, 3 or less in practice.
I also have a half-dozen variant usernames at GMail and can trivially create as many as I like on my own mail server. So, unbounded in theory.

Three personal, one work, two throwaways

Three. One from work, one personal, one throwaway.

I ignore a whole lot of shit.
1 email address, but I may need more at some point

I use simplelogin but mostly I still use an email that provides aliases. I break things up into five or six main groups. Content like games and streaming, shopping, social media, and a few others. This works as a general grouping for bookmarks, passwords, note taking, and emails.
I felt using a simplelogin alias for every site was out of control. For me personally I just need it a bit simpler.

Nice try FBI.

64 comments