Is it better to have just 1 email address for everything, work, mates, shopping, google, yahoo, forums etc etc. Or better to keep things apart and have several? Thoughts please.

2 with 1 dormant
I have 1 for everything personal and 1 for work. I sometimes use the work one for personal but not very often.
I have a dormant yahoo one from when you had to be in yahoo to get into flickr but they keep turning that off as I never use it.
Gmail keeps things very organised so not too worried about it. Saves losing things by not remembering where it was sent.

I have one, same one i have had for 15yrs+, does that make me a luddite or am i just too lazy to bother changing it?…dunno….can’t be arsed wi the faff…so i guess i’m just lazy.

Two, work and personal, my brain would melt trying to keep track of whats what otherwise

Work and personal. They never mix.

One work.
One personal using my name for ‘real people’.
One internet one for forums/eBay etc.
A joint one that is just used for a couple of shared websites with my wife (kindle etc, originally years back for Yahoo messenger). Pretty much dormant.
A google one that is used by my phone/google play.

So thats five 🙂 With the exception of my work one, they all download to Outlook so it all ends up in one place without multiple logging in.

Infinite.

I issue emails from my domain unique to each organisation I have a commercial relationship with. Using a catch all I receive all addresses to my domain, but by issuing unique addresses I can filter emails more easily. I can also monitor who sells addresses to spammers and block specifically compromised addresses. It’s also more secure as bots are less likely to be able fish with a captured email on another site since the address wont be valid.

I have one address for personal communication and two addresses for work (different companies).

Apart from my work email address, I have three:
1. Friends & Family
2. Purchases
3. spare

Chris

Work, friends and forums

Then if you are using gmail and need to create other addresses to see who is spamming you you can create instant aliases using ‘+’, e.g leffeboy+stw@gmail.com

About 10 I can also have as many was I want with my domain.

What stoner said.

Plus I have a bunch of largely dormant webmail addresses for legacy reasons and for mailing lists.

1 for uni, 1 for work, 1 for personal. Think I have a couple dormant too set up ages ago.

leffeboy, that’s a neat idea.

Which is the main address and which is the alias, the second part or the first part before the +?

Infinite.

I issue emails from my domain unique to each organisation I have a commercial relationship with. Using a catch all I receive all addresses to my domain, but by issuing unique addresses I can filter emails more easily. I can also monitor who sells addresses to spammers and block specifically compromised addresses. It’s also more secure as bots are less likely to be able fish with a captured email on another site since the address wont be valid.

This, and I recently got an apology from a well known company for selling on my e-mail address.

I have 6 gmail accounts
1 “all” to which the others forward everything
work
home
“STWish/bikes”
spammy signups (I tried the “+” thing but CBA in the end – and even I could prob write a rule for automatic removal of “+anything…”@gmail if I was a spammer)

1 x gmail specific to one workplace (one of 2 half-jobs)

also a NHS.net and a local trust nhs address – one forwards to the other so not too bad

couple of redundant old ones