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

5 points by thefool ↗ HN
As I've gotten older I've accumulated more e-mail addresses.

Then it comes time to sign up for a new service and I never really know which email address to use.

Like when do you use a personal email addy, when do you use a school one, a work one?

Do you have a "spam" address? Do you ever use it?

4 comments

[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] thread
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.