I've recently been working to minimize my email clutter, my dependance on certain email providers, and to consolidate services under certain accounts.
I'm down to the following uses:
Apple ID, mydomain-billing/subscriptions, mydomain-official/legal, anon, friends/family, business domain.
I also have a handful of aliases and an account just for newsletters and my RSS app.
I'm curious if others have several email addresses for similar uses or if you use your email client to categorize incoming messages for you. For people who only have one email address, how do you manage this?
I use simplelogin but mostly I still use an email that provides aliases. I break things up into five or six main groups. Content like games and streaming, shopping, social media, and a few others. This works as a general grouping for bookmarks, passwords, note taking, and emails.
I felt using a simplelogin alias for every site was out of control. For me personally I just need it a bit simpler.
Right now, a bit over 410 email addresses. Almost all of them are my simplelogin aliases. That leaves the protonmail addresses and the one gmail I created but never used because I use only if it's a form or something I can only fill out once the owner forgets to open it up to everybody that doesn't have a google account.
I do the same thing with email aliases and I’ve deactivated just two in the years I’ve been doing it.
One the comes to mind is Scentbird, they get hacked like every month because they’re on some shitty Wordpress server so they unintentionally leak your data all the time.
Not OP but Under Armor sells your shit instantly in my experience. I’ve got the same setup and just turn the address off after I get my order. I must have got forwarded 2-3 spam things a day before I killed it.
I do this same thing with unique email addresses recipients when I have to give out an email address. My "wall of shame" email sellers/hacked companies includes:
honestly, nothing to really report. this could be confirmation bias as i tend to avoid the problem actors( the facebooks, the fly-by-night vendors), but I have yet to see any egregious address-sharing in the last several years.
i still get quite a bit if spam from places that used to broadcast email addresses on their sites like early versions of the SETI distributed processing project
I have multiple domains and backup addresses on ProtonMail, so technically I have infinite addresses :P
I split mails domains at the identity level, and addresses (under my custom domains, for proton I use their simplelogin integration) are split between services, even though I use my main one in most places still.
Email addresses can't be arbitrarily long, so technically you don't have an infinite number. But you could easily use up as many addresses as there are atoms in the universe every Planck time until its heat death and it would still only amount to an infinitesimal fraction of the total.
I had 2 main ones, but they also got emails from one of my old accounts, for technically 3. But I just moved to Proton mail, so now I'm trying to stick with one + aliases. I'm hoping to keep it this way 😤
I only have one email address from ProtonMail but I make extensive use of their "Additional Addresses" feature and I use ProtonPass email aliases. There are only a few sites which know my real email address (around 15 I think).
Edit: technically I also have a Gmail address but I'm trying to get rid of that since it has my deadname in it.
$dayjob gave me an email, but they are the only ones that use it. My primary is a GMail, though I really should switch to a less crappy provider. I run my own mail server, all my GMail is just forwarded there, but it's not my primary because too many people were having problems sending or receiving mail though there.
So, 3 or less in practice.
I also have a half-dozen variant usernames at GMail and can trivially create as many as I like on my own mail server. So, unbounded in theory.
I have a "professional" email with my real name and one with my "online" name. They used to both be on gmail but now they are on Protonmail.
I also have some domain names I own which I can set up with Protonmail as the provider... Kinda tempted to move everything over to my domain so that I can switch providers if I need to without having to update things.
I use two actively but technically I have a gmail adress but only use it to log in to YouTube with it. If you sent me an email there I will probably never see it.
I have a wildcard rule set up to catch things sent to addresses on my domain that I don’t have explicitly configured… so technically, I have infinite email addresses.
I have one paid email address that’s my main that I purchased from an overseas provider, just to complicate spying and reduce perverse motivations to use my data to profit.
I have a secondary older email address, a professional work email address, and then a long tail of anti-spam aliases.
Mostly six: family and friends, romantic relationships, professional, online identity, signing to Google services*, signing to other services.
I say "mostly" because I went through dozens of addresses, already abandoned. And the "signing to other services" e-mail has disposable addresses, that I use fairly often.
*I use this as a way to limit what Alphabet knows about me, given that it's the biggest data vulture that I can't get rid of.
I made a bunch of burner Google accounts back when it was easy to do so so I have many addresses from there + a couple in protonmail. In total it should be 2 "serious" addresses, 1 for games and non-serious services, 2-3 for some specialized stuff and about 8(?) dummy accounts, some of which have connected accounts to social media which have been locked.
Dozens, but they all converge into 2 mailboxes. It's nice to keep things separate, but it does get confusing sometimes. If I didn't have a password manager to remember my logins, it would be untenable.
For stuff I'm going to use long terms i use my lifetime university email address which forwards to me main fastmail address. I have several fastmail addresses for dev stuff, bacon (not quite spam), one for patreon and kickstarter, and so on. Those all go to one mailbox.
My old gmail account is just for spam, google's account spam, and (I only recently noticed) github. I check that mailbox like 3 times a year.
Also all my domains have at least an info address that forwards to my dev fastmail address, and we have a household group address that forwards to my fastmail as well.