How many email address do you need...?

I got over 100...don't ask me why.

I use my main email for everything except banking or sensitive stuff. For those i use a seperate email and i dont give that out to anyone.

personal for day to day use
secondary to use for job applications and online banking to safe guard so no one can hack your bank if they hack your primary email
burner for mailing lists and sites you never plan to go back to
work email, that your company provides
4 should suffice

Depends on how many times you want to be a "new customer " to same company

Cheapo-Findo wrote: ↑ I got over 100...don't ask me why.

1 email per promotional offer. I feel you!

Do alias count? If so, I’m probably well north of 200. (But it’s also a lot easier when you have your own domain). Basically every service I sign up for gets a new name. Helps in 4 ways. If that site gets compromised, then the attackers can’t try and use the same login name elsewhere (although strong passwords also help with that). If the address gets put on a spam list, I can just blacklist that one incoming address and not affect anything else. It makes it easier to spot phishing scams as it’s hard to take one my addresses and try and convince me it came from someone else. And it makes incoming emails a lot easier to filter as I can classify its source based on the incoming address (vs the sending address which they can and often change regularly). But this approach is going to be too complicated and probably overkill for most people.

If I had to make a recommendation for others:

• Never mix business with personal. If you’ve got a business, keep it separate.
• Have one address for friends / family. This is also the address you’ll probably be sending most things out from too. Try to only give this one to actual people.
• Have one for financial sites. Your bank, credit card etc. Be very selective who you give this out to. Adds an extra layer of security through obscurity for your most sensitive info.
• Have one for things like shopping. Amazon, ebay etc. As these sites tend to have things like credit cards and addresses, they’re a little more sensitive. Chances are you’ll rarely (if ever) send email out from this address, so just forward to your friends / family address. But this address can also get a little spammy as business will sign you up for their newsletters. If spam gets too much, you can dump this one without too much pain.
• Have a true mailing list address. Someone wants your email to send out a monthly newsletter? Give them his one. You want to sign up for coupons in your inbox from a site? Give them this one. You don’t have to care who gets this one. You’ll never have to reply to any of them, so just forward to your friends / family address. And when you get swamped, you can easily dump it and start over.

AchtungB4by wrote: ↑ This subject came up today at work.
Realistically in this day/age how many do you have? I am thinking 3: one for personal emailing with family/friends, one strictly for professional work purposes (I have a small consulting side-job from time-to-time) and one strictly for online stuff: forums, coupons, etc.

Some ppl I work with looked at me and said: "Three?! That's way too many!"

So thought I would ask on here if my current use of 3 accounts is overkill. Can a person really get away with just 1 email, esp with accounts getting hacked, etc.?!

3 is minimal. You can also have other that redirect to a main one. I use this with more than 10 gmail accounts.

AchtungB4by wrote: ↑ This subject came up today at work.
Realistically in this day/age how many do you have? I am thinking 3: one for personal emailing with family/friends, one strictly for professional work purposes (I have a small consulting side-job from time-to-time) and one strictly for online stuff: forums, coupons, etc.

Some ppl I work with looked at me and said: "Three?! That's way too many!"

So thought I would ask on here if my current use of 3 accounts is overkill. Can a person really get away with just 1 email, esp with accounts getting hacked, etc.?!

Not overkill at all, just being smart as you mentioned about hacking etc.. With one account you risk exposing everything. Have 3 accounts like you say: one account for all your strictly personal emails, and one account for general email, and one account for signing up for crap, let's you compartmentalize the risk.

Since I have my own domain I really should use more than the 2 I currently use. Haven't done much with aliases, but I guess it wouldn't be too tricky to set up (I don't want a ton of mailboxes cluttering up my phone.

(Using GSuite).

Does this include 10minute mail accounts?

2 outlook.com accounts with multiple aliases and websitename@mydomain for most websites.

I had 5 but closed 2 last month since they were not used at all. So currently I have 3.

The most important advice about email addresses is not to use the email address issued by your ISP for anything important. You'll lose it if you change ISPs, and they end up using that as leverage to keep you stuck with them when they raise their price.

You can use free email like Gmail, but keep in mind that you are sharing everything with an intrusive personal data miner, and one day Google may decide to hold your email address hostage too.

Best is if you have your own domain that you can move around freely, and manage your own domain email addresses.

Like many other people, I use aliases freely to give each company or service I deal with a unique address for me. I probably have > 200 of those like the others in this thread. That way I know who sold my email address to spammers, and I can cut them off without affecting others. Also useful for getting additional promo offers that are one-per-email.

You can effectively do the alias thing with Gmail as well. Gmail ignores any period in your name, and ignores any appendix to your name added after a + sign, so johndoe@gmail.com, john.doe@gmail.com, and johndoe+addr1@gmail.com are all the same to Gmail, but not to other services asking for your email address.

Personally I’m using 5 right now:
Outlook for General day to day, banking and whatnot
Gmail for online shopping & gaming
iCloud for Apple services, but not used otherwise
G Suite mail from my company for work only
Office 365 mail from my University for school only

I’ll log in to different services through my web browser, but on the go I’ve got them all feeding through the Outlook app for iOS (except for Gmail app for work email) which works real well for my needs.

Maybe 12?

@AchtungB4by , there should be a poll!

no one in their right minds needs more than 4 - 5 email addresses
any thing more is just rediculous and overkill plus who has the time to remember that many passwords

GoodFellaz wrote: ↑ plus who has the time to remember that many passwords

I'd wager you have far more logins to websites than email accounts. If you aren't using unique passwords for each, you're seriously compromising your online security.

Also, password managers are awesome!

Over 200 for promotional offers