How many email addresses do you have? supine-owl.com
@vishae Including aliases I think I have about a dozen. But there are 3 main addresses I use. One is for personal communication with real people of some importance in my life plus my financial institutions. Number two is for personal email but from the general public. The third is for social media accounts and a few shopping/retail accounts. All are on trusted email providers (e.g. not gmail).
@vishae My email client says 16 ... some I rarely use but one for work, one privately, one for email lists, one for registering software etc, one for news letters. Those are the main ones.
@vishae I have an email per domain (4) plus gmail and Apple mail and a few odds and sods beyond that primarily represent my presence in other people’s worlds ... plus Hundreds ... if not thousands ..l literally.
They aren’t their own account ... but they are all unique emails ... each one maps to a r fist ration of something, a login, a news letter ...... messages into each of those emails all come into a single box and I use rules to route them to a folder .. eg newsletters, service, products etc etc ...
The unique names are very specific eg comcast@ ...... allows for easy searching in the mail system plus knowing that my rhister d email is treated properly.
@vishae given that your email addresses are sold and shared and end up in the hands of data brokers like Google and Facebook anyway, I am unsure of the utility of having "one for all my other online accounts that aren’t social".
I have gmail, yahoo, icloud, comcast, outlook.com, etc. email address.
With the ease of getting my name in my email address, you can be assured of find at khurtwilliams@[anything.com] including past employers who use first.last @companydomain.com (these will of course bounce).
@jemostrom huh, I didn’t think about using one for registering software. How would you separate software that you just register once vs software that has on-going subscription or an online sync/login component?
@JohnPhilpin I didn’t think about how unique aliases would allow for ease of search or rules creation. That’s definitely something I should think about. I forget where I read/heard this (maybe a podcast) where someone says they have a unique alias for every email address they hand out to businesses, just for the sake of knowing which company sold their customer’s email address. It’s a very smart idea.
@ronguest “Aliases”! That’s the word I was looking for. I kept thinking mailboxes because that’s what my work’s IT department calls them.
@vishae I don’t, I haven’t had any need for that. I’ve been using this “registration account” for 20+ years (I think) and it’s the best idea I’ve had when it comes to email.
@vishae haven’t QUITE got to that extreme ... but certainly applies to me receiving an email to comcast@ about nothing to do with Comcast
@JohnPhilpin it’s kind of disgusting that a company as big as Comcast (who charges you money on a regular basis too) would sell their customer info...
@vishae @JohnPhilpin I use unique aliases for every company/website and it is immediately obvious who has had their user information compromised or is selling your information. Kickstarter and Hawaiian Airlines have been the two biggest offenders for me.
@chrispederick oh, I didn’t think Kickstarter would be bad. Do you think it’s Kickstarter itself or the individual projects?
@vishae Yeah, my guess is it’s not Kickstarter directly, but one of the projects sold their mailing list. I would imagine the email list of people who have backed certain project types could be sold for a sizable amount.
@kimonostereo Hawaiian is all over the map vs. Kickstarter which is usually random projects to back on competing funding sites. Hawaiian is general spam so they were either compromised a long time ago (this has been happening for years) or they just sell customer data.
@chrispederick @vishae @JohnPhilpin I try to use email aliases whenever I can. Not all sites allow Gmail's "+" addresses, which is why I like that FastMail also accepts business@username.fastmail.com as an alias.