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I spend a good portion of my life in Microsoft Outlook (2003, the most recent version). For various reasons, Outlook has become my email program of choice since before it was even called Outlook. That's not to say I haven't looked at other email programs. I keep a copy of Outlook Express ready for answering people's questions. I have Mozilla Thunderbird installed for it's newsgroup reader, for the available email encryption add-on, and for it's ability to just "suck up" email in raw, plain text. I even have a copy of a non-GUI email program called Pine, and regularly use the the old Unix/Linux plain vanilla workhorse "mail".

Apparently a lot of my life revolves around email.

Unless you're a geek like me (and heaven help you if you are), you don't need a long list of email programs. You probably just need one. The right one, of course.

So which one do you need? And how do you choose from the tens or perhaps hundreds of other choices?

How do you choose what email program to use?

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?

My first recommendation is going to sound very counter-intuitive. In fact, many of you are going to think I'm completely nuts. Or, perhaps, even more nuts than you already thought.

One of the reasons I was able to do the analysis in the article That's a lot of mail! is because I save all my mail.

All my mail.

I have every piece of mail my wife and I received last year. Every bit of spam, every virus, every incoming message, no matter how important, how annoying or how trivial.

That seems like the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish as we try to tame the beast that is email. We want less mail, not more, right?

So why do I do it? Because it's incredibly liberating.