How many email addresses do you need?

It all starts with spam

The single most important reason to consider using more than one email address is simple: spam.

But only if you do it right. Here's what I suggest as a start.

Create three email addresses:

• A private email address. Keep this address private, and give it only to well-trusted friends, family, and perhaps very important services, such as perhaps your bank. Never use it in a public forum, or for anything that doesn't have your utmost trust.
• A public email address. You use this for anyone else that you want email from, that doesn't meet the criteria for the private address. Casual friends, business relationships, people you meet on the street, newsletters and websites that require registration and ongoing communication. The key here is that you may not completely trust them, but you do want to get their email, should they send some to you.
• A throw-away email address. This is for situations where you're required to give an email address - perhaps one that you need to be able to respond with - but after that, you just don't care. If you're going to post an email address in a public forum, for example, this would be the one to use. Signing up for a contest, or a website registration, but you don't want to get spammed by follow-up marketing material? Again, your "throw-away" address would be the one to use.

Let's look at each in turn, and why each has an important role.

Your Private Inner Circle

If you've managed your private email address properly, and your friends are all trustworthy (including being rigorous about their own anti-virus and anti-spyware scanning), then in most cases you should get almost no spam on this address. I know of several people that even after a couple of years have used their private email address judiciously and get no spam on it. You might even consider bypassing spam filtering on this address, if you like. Or, if you care to and have access to the tools, since you know who you gave it to, you could set a higher-than-normal spam threshold for this account - which would filter anything the smells the least bit like spam, and then explicitly whitelist everyone you've given the address to. Those whitelist entries would then bypass the spam filter completely.

The key here is that your private email address is, by definition, your most important. Later, when we talk about rules and actively managing your inbox, you can also take special actions on email you receive on this address, to ensure it gets your attention before some of your less important emails.

Your Public Persona

Your public address should still be treated carefully, but it's this address on which you'll expect to get more spam, and more other emails of questionable value. By keeping it separate from your private address, you can treat these emails differently. By definition, they're less important, right? So besides looking at them after you've dealt with your private email, you might also consider not looking at them as often, or in batches. If you've tweaked the spam filter settings for your private mail, you might select a somewhat lower setting for your public mail, so as to reduce the probability that legitimate mail will be spam-filtered.

One thing you should most definitely avoid is to posting it unaltered in a public forum or web site. I'll discuss techniques to avoid that in a future essay.

An Email Address for Riffraff

Your throw-away address is just that. If it went away tomorrow, you wouldn't be heartbroken. Free email accounts are perfect for this. (Often because sometimes they do just disappear.)

The best example is a website that requires free registration in order to view. You know you never want to hear from them again after you've completed your registration, so your throw-away address is perfect. Register, respond to the confirmation request sent to that address, and then ignore all email sent to that address until you need it for some specific purpose again later.

If you must post a valid email address in a public place or untrustworthy situation, these are also candidates for your throw-away address. If it starts to get spammed to heavily, you can either ignore it, or create a new throw-away address and discard, or ignore the old one. The key here is that except for very short time, specific needs, you really don't care about email sent to this address at all. Anyone you really want to hear from on some kind of ongoing basis will have either your private or public addresses.

Addresses or Accounts?

As I discussed in a previous essay, On Domains, Accounts and Addresses, email accounts and addresses are two different things. Each account is a separate download or service. Multiple addresses could all forward to the same account.

So what do you want? Three different accounts, or three different addresses that all feed the same account?

I strongly prefer three different accounts for a couple of reasons:

• You can prioritize how you check your mail. Check your private mail first or more often. Check your public mail less often. Check your throw-away mail never, or only when you are actually expecting something on it. Especially on the throw-away account, that means you'll simply never see or download a significant amount of spam.
• You can set up forwards to those accounts that are more flexible. For example, you could in fact have several different private email addresses, that all forward to your private account. (Why you might want to have several addresses is the subject of a future essay, but for example you might have a different private address for family and business use.) Similarly, for your throw-away email, you always check the same account, but perhaps have several addresses that forward to it ... perhaps one for each public place you've used a throwaway address, so you can see which is causing you to receive additional spam.

Ultimately the ability to create and use more than one email account and have different email addresses forward to them will be a key component of taming your email. While not absolutely required, it will definitely make some of our tips and techniques easier.