# I have too many email addresses. How to organize?



## chances2468

I have multiple email addresses that I opened up over the years, and it has gotten wayyy out of control.

My question is, how do you keep your accounts organized? 

How many do you suggest having? I was thinking, one for shopping, one for professional, one for friends,...?

What email (yahoo, gmail, some other provider, own domain name)? 

I want to maintain privacy as much as possible, and I noticed some will make your profile public.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! )


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## BlueG

Delete them all.


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## prplchknz

I have 3 i use one that i had to get for my phone and use for appointment reminders, a personal ones rhat i use to sign up for stuff with so all the junk mail goes to that one. i had since i was 12 and a school one which will be replaced one day by a professional one. I think 3 is a good number to have. at least a minimum of 2


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## sly

I'd say write them on a physical note and hide it well.


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## nádej

I also have 3 and find it's a good number. One is my work email (through our agency's server), one is my junk email (gmail), and one is my personal email/main email (gmail).

I only ever check my personal email and my work email, and they both are synced-up with my phone so it's not too bad at all.


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## kagemitsu

I've got 3 as well.

The main one (gmail) is for the important stuff. Like job applications, sending emails to university professors and every other real life stuff.
The 2nd one (hotmail) is for when I sign up to forums, websites, services and anything on the web that requires registration.
The 3rd one (hotmail) is to sign up to websites that I know will send me tons of spam, and to sign up to porn websites.

I recommend getting a good email client to manage several addresses. I use Thunderbird myself.


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## Isthmus

I have a personal e-mail, a professional e-mail, and a junk e-mail. 

I give the personal e-mail to friends, and use it to sign up for "trusted" things where I do want to receive e-mails in a timely manner. The professional e-mail is given out in professional contexts. The junk e-mail is used when I sign up on any website I don't particularly care to receive e-mail from. I only check the junk account very rarely though, but after having used it for a couple of years to sign up to all sorts of random dodgy things, it has a steady flow of spam coming into it.

The professional e-mail is forwarded to the personal e-mail (on Gmail) though, so I only actually need to check one mail-box. I then use an automatic filter to label them, so I can just bring up all the e-mails from my professional account if needed. You know you can do that, right? 

If I were more paranoid about privacy, I'd probably make something like:

1. Personal account, only given to close friends
2. A work account
3. A couple of different accounts for signing up to stuff. Register with a faked name, and the profile thing will not really be an issue. Have a couple of different ones, so you can give different ones to different websites, lest they try to gain any information by cross-referencing with each other.

Also, I'd use forwarding to make all of them come into the same Inbox, so that it's not actually much of a hassle to run this scheme.

I'd also designate some of the accounts in 3 as spam, and have mail sent to those sent straight to the trash.


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## geekofalltrades

Choose one account that you like best, then use IMAP, POP3, or mail forwarding to forward all of the emails from the other accounts to that one. You can set up mail filters to tag the incoming messages as belonging to the different accounts. Then you have them all in one spot and neatly organized by address.


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