How many email addresses do you use?

I've always had multiple email addresses, right now I have 6:

• One "private": let's say it's the main one, used for everything except for the things I use the other ones for.
• One "dev": for my dev related accounts: GitHub, Dev.to, DigitalOcean, Namecheap, that kind of things.
• Two for work: as a consultant I have an address at my company and one at the client's premises.
• A Gmail address: for Google stuff only.
• A "dirty" address: I don't really use it, but when I need to create an account I'm not sure to keep, I use this address, it allows me to keep the main one clean.

... and I'll probably have a 7th one soon enough (for freelancing, my dev one wont do and I'd like to keep work-related stuff outside the private one).

But I'm starting to think it's too much... hence the question:

How many email addresses do you use? What for?

Comments

[Anthony Bouvier]

One, but I use the built-in aliasing.

GMail for instance you can have an email like [e-mail] and when you sign up on a site you can do [e-mail]

Emails they send you will still go to [e-mail] and you can use the +nameofwebsite part to see who it was who maybe sold your email or had a breach. Can also use it for rules and labelling things.

SOME terrible devs out there don't allow + in email addresses even though it is wholly valid to have that character. Lots of devs screw up email name validation. Don't be like those devs if you ever have to validate emails.

GMail also allows for any number of dots in your name. So you can also use [e-mail] or [e-mail] if you want. I do this sometimes to re-sign up for trials if the service doesn't allow for the + trick mentioned above.

[David Hughes]

Yes, not allowing for + in emails is terrible practice. I wish I bookmarked it but I read a great article a few years ago all about email validation and how futile it pretty much is - the conclusion was to just check for the presence of an '@' character. Email validation is best done by sending an email to the address and seeing if the user opens it/goes to some link within it.

Everything before the '@' is entirely ruled by the mailserver, so any validation rules you apply to this are effectively an assumption on the rules your user's mailserver use. I guess you could validate the post-'@' characters but with how many new TLDs are coming out this seems like more hassle than it's worth. Trust your users to know their emails (but make sure you're still encoding the input so as to avoid nasty SQL injection etc!)

[Anthony Bouvier]

Hopefully doing more than just encoding/escaping -- never place user data directly into a SQL statement! Always use placeholders like ? or whatever your flavor of DB allows. And if it doesn't allow for that, really think hard about why you're using that db (or db sdk)!

[David Hughes]

Fair, I just wanted to throw in something about security after making the questionably phrased statement of 'trust user input' :D

[Thomas H Jones II]

GMail for instance you can have an email like [e-mail] and when you sign up on a site you can do [e-mail]

Sadly, spammers and site-attackers know this trick.

• Spammers, after they've harvested such an address, know that if they see "+", they can peel off the "extra" to spam you to your main mailbox
• Attckers, if you've used a predictable "+", can predict what your other addresses might be on other sites ...so you still want to use unique passwords per site

GMail for instance you can have an email like [e-mail] and when you sign up on a site you can do [e-mail]

Heh... And has been valid for over 20 years — at least that's when Sendmail added it. You'd think over two decades would be enough time for people to get the drift. :p

GMail also allows for any number of dots in your name.

Sadly, support for that in gSuite seems to be lacking. Probably because they know a lot of companies like to assign .@. So, if you have a legacy Apps account for your personal domain, you can't use that trick to work past the fifty free aliases limit. :(

[Tah Tor]

You can have unlimited temp email addresses with disposable email services.

[rhymes]

I always forget about these tricks. Thanks for the reminder!

[Ross Henderson]

I have a personal one, for general day-to-day things, this is generally as secure as I can make it with a good password, two-factor auth etc. A "professional one", which security isn't as important as it's just for job searching, etc. A private one, which really is just a store of information for myself, I don't email it and to other people from it, just store things in it. This is another secure one.

[Quentin Sonrel]

Aren't there better solutions than a mail account for the last use case?

[Thomas H Jones II]

Google mail accounts are great for archiving. Even without buying extra space, you can store years (decades?) worth of content. Can do it with either an auto-forwarding rule or, if you're just setting it up, a simple IMAP-based copy.

Aren't there better solutions than a mail account for the last use case?

The beauty is it's kept in a portable, easy to access structure (its original format) and usually stays accessible via its former methods. Can't really say the same for things like PSTs and some purpose-built mail-archival solutions.

[Ross Henderson]

Quite likely, but I'll be honest I don't care too much about it. It's stuff like passphrases for websites I don't quite care enough about.

I am looking at investing in a Password Manager though, and there are solutions out there like LastPass that may be a better solutions to that.

[Quentin Sonrel]

I started using a password manager recently and that's honestly life changing. You should take a look at Bitwarden: it's free, open-source and self-hostable (but not only, they provide a public instance). You can store passwords/credentials (obviously), credit cards, identity and secured notes (chunks of text, you can put whatever you want in it).

[Ross Henderson]

Sounds ideal, I'll give it a look. Cheers for that!

[João]

I used to have an account in almost every email provider (Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Apple) but I felt the need to have everything in one place. Five or six years ago I started to approach emails like Anthony, with two exceptions:

• I have an email account for college, because I have to;
• I have a Gmail account for trials, using aliasing in my favor; that way I don't need to create fake throwaway addresses.

For services that I really do not care (and don't do email verification), I make up something along the lines of [e-mail].

[Juan F Gonzalez]

I have 3 on permanent sites and another 2 that are volatile addresses, so naturally either don't check some very often or could spend an entire day just reading emails. Worth mentioning that in one outlook account I have 4 different alias with their respective 'inboxes'.

[Sergey Kislyakov]

<service_name>@defman.me. It forwards everything to my private Gmail account.

[Quentin Sonrel]

For security reasons?

[Sergey Kislyakov]

Yeah. I can block services who send too much spam or detect leaks.

[tiff]

6, gmail and gSuite: one that’s personal, two I just dump stuff in I rarely look at that I’ve had for the past 9 years, two for my blogs, one for “business”. A bunch of aliases for my gSuite accounts.

[Stan]

11, but 5 of those are client addresses, and as the blah+myname@google, is circumvented very easily, and all spammers know the trick, I have a throwaway address (spam magnet that one). So no, 6 isn't a lot.

[Alex Macniven]

I managed to get down to 2(ish) email addresses;

• @outlook.com is my primary. I have an alias on this account for sign-up's and stuff I probably won't read. It's filtered and often end's up in Trash rather than Archive
• @mywork.com is my work account. I've also made a big attempt to not sync this account with any of my devices apart from my office workstation, it's harder than it sounds!

[Quentin Sonrel]

I'd actually like to reduce to 2-3 addresses too.

Especially since a lot of the answers to this thread made me realize how useful aliases are and how it could replace my many different addresses.

I've also made a big attempt to not sync this account with any of my devices apart from my office workstation

I actually done the opposite: I don't use mails very much for my job but I still have to keep an eye on this address if I don't want to miss out important things. So it's synced with my personal smartphone, to ensure I'll check it from time to time.

[Thomas H Jones II]

Personal address: I've had it since 1997. That said, I've got a bajillion aliases that all point to the one mailbox: advantage of hosting your own email ...and why I can never (cost-effectively) move my personal mail to gApps (et. al.). Only give my unaliased personal address to family and friends.

Work address: Changes with job, obviously. When signing up for work-related web-sites, still use personal aliases so my work address doesn't get spammed (and set up auto-forwarding rules to my work account and auto-foldering rules on my work account for those auto-forwarded emails).

"Backup" address: usually gmail - where I send things when the sender's email system is poorly set up (the spam controls on my personal address are pretty freaking aggressive ...necessary when your email address is old enough to drink).

[Noah Betzen]

Personal: An outlook.com email that I've used for many years. I use this to sign up for most online personal accounts.

Professional personal: My own domain email hosted through ProtonMail. I use this for most professional correspondence with employers and other developers.

Personal Gmail: Used for Google services mostly.

Professional Personal Gmail: Before I had my own domains, I used this one for professional personal things. It's still used for a few Google services.

Old university account: A .edu that I now have forwarding to the personal Gmail.

There are a few other inexplicable ones I don't use but still have access to: A Yahoo email, a few other outlook.com emails, etc.