Email Accounts

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I'm just curious how many email accounts people have?

What are your reasons for having multiple accounts?

Do you use them all, or are some of them dormant?

At one point I had a lot of email accounts. Now I just have a paid Fastmail account and a gmail account. The gmail account very soon became a spam magnet.It's utterly useless at getting rid of it . I've not checked it for over 6 months.

I hate gmail ^

I find it very hard to use or organise.

I have two email accounts, both of them with my internet service provider BT (British Telecom). One of them features my real name, the other is based on one of the user names I use on message boards. I also have a fake email address that I used to set up a Windows 10 account, though it wasn't actually necessary to do this, I later discovered.

Do you know why some people might have like 20-25 email accounts?

Not really, but computing junkies are pretty strange people, and even they probably couldn't tell you why. I have over 40 laptops, and maybe 60-70 operating systems in existence on them, but the main reason is undoubtedly a fascination about such things for their own sake, certainly no practical applications. I think there's also a fantasy element in having multiple identities, the idea of being 'under the radar' and all of that. Such people, among whom I include myself, also tend to be into encryption, VPNs, script blockers (NoScript, Umatrix, etc) and the like.

That's kind of what I thought.
Thanks!

I have a number of e-mail addresses.

There is a good reason why just about everyone should have multiple addresses -- to reduce the chance of falling for a scam.

I have a secret e-mail address that is only used for e-mails to and from financial institutions. If I should get an e-mail to a normal address telling me that my bank account or a credit card account is being used by criminals, if the e-mail is not addressed to me at the secret e-mail address, then I immediately know that it is a scam.

Some people do that with just about everything. No two companies or people are given the same e-mail address. If they start getting spammed at that address, then they know from whom the spammers got the address. They can block that address and never use it again.

I do something like that with aliases. With many e-mail services, you can use a '+' and various text after your username. For example, if your address is [email protected], you can use [email protected] when creating an account at an on-line vendor. Any e-mail to that would be delivered to you at [email protected]. My general approach anymore is to use something like [email protected] where the 0316 is the current time in 24 hour format and wz indicates that it is with an organization or person with the initials wz.

This doesn't always work, though. Many web sites don't recognize the '+' sign as a valid character in an e-mail address. Some web sites recognize it on some web forms, but not on others.

Some servers use a '-' instead of a '+' for this. That has an advantage in that most people would just assume the '-' as part of the address while if they understand aliases, they would probably realize that the '+' indicates an alias that they can strip off beginning with the '+' and ending with the last character before the '@'. Also, with a '-', you probably aren't going to find a web site that doesn't recognize the '-' as a valid character.

The address itself can be quite long depending on the server. The maximum is about 255 characters, but some sites limit the names to something shorter than that.

For what it's worth, my strangest e-mail address has 6.6743015x10-11m3kg-1s-2 as the username portion of the address.

So if you want to make it easier to identify legitimate e-mails from banks and credit card companies, set up a secret e-mail address and only give it to them. Better yet, set up a separate secret e-mail address for each bank and credit card that you have.

By the way, I have one e-mail address that can be found on millions of computers world-wide. If you have a computer with certain operating systems, you have that address of mine. It gets so much spam that it is pretty much unusable.

However, I can get some use from it. The hosting service for that address uses '-' for aliases. I can send an e-mail to it with a '-' alias and set up filters to handle it separately from other addresses. So, for example, if the address was [email protected], I can give out [email protected] to WalMart, effectively allowing me to have an e-mail address for the one site that is not used on any other site.

Technically, near-infinite. I decided decades ago to run my own personal email server and domains, and set up catchall addresses. So if someone asks me for an email address, I can make one up on the spot. For example, if Jim's Garage wants one, I can tell them <[email protected]>. Or I can use different ones for every website that wants one, or every third-party account.

Advantages:
- that email address will only have ever been given out to them, so if any spam starts coming in using that destination address, I know where the spammers got the address from and I can do something about that

- adding a random number to the end of every email address I give out means they're less likely to be spoofed by spambots generating random addresses; I can filter out anything coming to any address without a number on the end, or mark it with a spam header and auto-transfer it to a spam folder

- any address I give out, at any moment, will instantly work and come to my regular inbox, as long as it has one of my domains in it - I don't need to set anything up for each new address

- I get to learn about some of the deeper aspects of email as an interesting hobby and skillset

- in theory, I should be able to add a subject line prefix consisting of the bracketed email username, which would make spam attempts sent to completely unrelated old email addresses look ludicrously out of place. Hmm, I should look into this...

- I get to argue with people who try to tell me "That's not a real email address!" and usually win instantly by telling them to try sending email to it, which I receive just fine. Doubles as a way to easily spot people who like to pretend they know what they're talking about but actually don't

Disadvantages:
- if you're not into learning about tech setups, it's probably a bit fiddly

- you really need an ISP willing to forward email from a home server, if you don't have a business account, and some spam systems will trigger on your email if you don't keep up with increasingly onerous technical security requirements

I have 3:

Personal, Work, and the third is for, banking, bill-pay, Dr's etc.

(for those who hate gmail, there's no reason not to use it with your own e-mail app/client. If you're concerned about security, all of the free services are equally bad)

I have three email accounts. One I got given to me for free when I got the internet switched into my name. I have to use it to sign in to pay my bill, but I've never actually used the email. The other two, one is my personal one that I use for sending people actual emails, giving to my doctors office, things like that. The other one, I use for things like signing up for this site, or giving to stores when they ask for one. I find I get less junk/spam on my regular email by having that second one for websites and stores.

2 email addys , are actually almost my limit ..and one does not get much attn. from me ..have tried and tried to adjust the amount of spam i recieve, but it seems my isp wants me to get all this spam. Their spam filters take hours to sort out . So i spend so much of my time deleting spam , due to this, it makes the internet , not a good viable means of effective communication for me . .
my isp has a easy way of selecting items for spam, but has a limit of 50 senders????

Not equally bad by any means. About the only real advantage to gmail is that you get plenty of storage with a free account.

In comparison, free accounts at sites like ProtonMail and MailFence have rather limited storage.

My paid Visionary account at ProtonMail, on the other hand, has more than six terabytes of storage which makes gmail look pathetic.

With my ProtonMail account, I can add up to five additional users (already done that) and have up to 100 addresses between them. It can also handle up to 10 additional domains of which I currently have three.

On one of the domains, I have it set up with a catchall address. Anything that comes in to that domain that is not to an existing e-mail address goes to the catchall address resulting into a very similar situation as Dial1194 described above.

For what it's worth, I have several servers set up and each of them can send and receive e-amail. The main use of the e-mail on them is that they send their logs to the ProtonMail account I mentioned above. For example, if I want to compile programs, I can do the compile and send the results by e-mail. I can then read the batch log on one screen while editing the programs on another. It works out really nicely.

@Dial1194 - how long have you been living in my head?

That's exactly how I run my mail system - I could have written your post practically word for word.