

Ask HN: Which E-mail address do you use and when? - thefool

As I've gotten older I've accumulated more e-mail addresses.<p>Then it comes time to sign up for a new service and I never really know which email address to use.<p>Like when do you use a personal email addy, when do you use a school one, a work one?<p>Do you have a "spam" address?  Do you ever use it?
======
frossie
I try to have no more than four addresses going at a time:

1\. Work

2\. Friends, family, and signing up for free services that I want to identify
myself with

3\. Commercial transactions (anybody who has my credit card)

4\. Anonymous address (which I use with websites that require signup but I
feel have no business asking me). I personally use my real identity online for
historical reasons, but if I didn't, I'd use this one.

[Edit: to answer your other question, they all get spam]

~~~
thefool
Do you ever use your college one?

~~~
frossie
Well I don't have one (is this a US thing? you get email for life when you get
to college?) but I wouldn't anyway - I don't self-identify with institutions
as a rule.

Edit: Really I would recommend you get your own domain (not a joke one) and
use an email address there which you can carry around forever. You can always
forward to gmail or whatever if you don't want to deal with spam filtering
etc.

------
kineticac
I just use one gmail account. Any other email account I just forward.
Eventually everyone just emails to that one account since I always reply from
it. It's not a problem at all.

With filters, using the +blah functionality (email+spam@gmail.com for
example), it works great! Never need anything else.

