I’ve been through different phases with regards to email address; a long time ago, I had separate email addresses ranked by how important I valued the correspondence, then I moved to Google to have the “one inbox” experience. But with my decision to move things under my own domain (and with unified inboxes being a more common feature now in mail clients), I felt it was time to have my own email address(es).

Now comes the question, how many email addresses do I need?
With my own domain(s), I can essentially have an unlimited number of email addresses.

I’m still trying to work out the little details, but this is what I’m thinking of right now:
– an email address for all my social media accounts (I might keep this as my gmail account. Why let the silos know even more about me – my new domain – than they already do?)
– one for all my other online accounts that aren’t social (online orders, bills, online services etc)
– one for real life interactions (banks, government correspondences, taxes, job applications etc)
– one as the account recovery email address for all my other accounts

It’s interesting, in the latest ATP episode, John Siracusa was bemoaning the fact that his mother still had a separate spam email address. He was saying that since his mother still checked the spam address’ inbox the whole exercise was moot.
I agree with that assessment, but my multi-email lifestyle is less about splitting my emails by type and more about separating my online identity. I don’t want government departments or future job prospects looking up my social feeds, just as I don’t want online retail outlets finding my LinkedIn profile. Does that make sense? Is there some flaw in my reasoning? How many email addresses do you have?