February 2006 Archives

As I reviewed the amount of email that I get, both in aggregate when I looked at last year's email, and just in passing as I deal with my day-to-day email, it occurred to me that a lot of the email I was getting was by choice, or by failing to make a choice when I had the chance. Hence, I started making some different choices, and started reducing the email I was getting.

In short, I asked the senders to stop.

In How many email addresses do you need? I advocated that you need at least three email addresses. To review, I strongly recommend that you have:

• A private address for people you trust and prioritize highly.
• A public address for everyone else from whom you want to get email.
• A throw-away address for one time, or occasional use that you ignore the rest of the time.

That's a start. It's a good start, and will go a long way to taming the beast.

But it's just a start. Especially if you get a lot of mail, you can do better.

Rather than sprinkle comments throughout Taming Email, I'm setting aside this item specifically for your questions and feedback.

TamingEmail.com comes from a ton of ideas that are swirling around in my head having to do with managing email more effectively. As with so many things swirling around in my brain, it's full of promise, but highly disorganized.

So here's a brain-dump. An outline, a road map, a sense of direction. The topics concepts and ideas that TamingEmail.com is going to cover.

In other words, just where do I think I'm headed?

If you answered "one", I'm here to tell you you're setting yourself up for a lot of spam, viruses, abuse and who knows what else. Heck, if you answered "two", there's still room for improvement.

Yes, I believe that anyone who uses email extensively (and who on the internet doesn't these days?) needs at least three separate email addresses. Perhaps even three separate email accounts. Accounts and addresses are most definitely not the same, and I'll explain why that's important in a moment.

In my opinion, the days of using just a single email address are long past. Fortunately ISPs are getting wise to this as well, and with the plethora of free email services, it's easy to have a virtually unlimited number of email addresses. If you happen to own your own domain, then the possibilities are virtually endless.

But why would you want more than one? And assuming you have more than one, how should they best be set up?