With many webmail and desktop email clients offering their services for free, there is no reason why everyone shouldn’t have multiple email accounts. This is not mere human greed, mind you, as we live in the times when email addresses are misused by marketers and other more malicious perpetrators.
Not intending to sound paranoid, but the idea of using one email address for all correspondence is outdated. Having at least two email accounts is recommended — to separate private from business messages.
For people who enjoy multiple activities online, especially commenting, blogging and hanging out on social media, using aliases is a must. Maintaining online privacy may be a difficult task (if not impossible), but some precautions are still in place.
Spammers Having a Field Day
The multitude of spam messages is the first reason why everyone should consider at least using a separate email address for subscriptions, online shopping, and free downloads. One thing is certain: any service that trades in email addresses does it for a good reason. If you are lucky, that reason is newsletters and promotions. If not, it is phishing attempts.
Even the most welcome of offers have no spot in your private or business inbox, as at the very least, they decrease the visibility of important messages. Admittedly, many email services do a splendid job with filtering, folders, and tags, but why bother with setting email rules and checking whether some important message has ended up being discarded, when you can simply use different email addresses for different activities.
That doesn’t mean you need a separate address for all activities. Common practice is to use one address for private correspondence, another for business purposes and as many additional ones for online activities. E.g., you will rarely see bloggers providing their full names and private email addresses, both because they use aliases and don’t wish their private address to attract unwanted attention. The practice is quite similar to real-life situations. You don’t want every business trying to push their offer on you to have your private info, do you?
Businesses and Email
Tomes have been written about the use of email in business purposes, but of late, email campaigns are the most affordable marketing tool. The trend is nowhere near abating, so additional troubles with unwanted messages are to be expected in the future.
Business email addresses are the single most vulnerable category. Regardless of whether the business is small, medium or large, keeping a clean inbox may mean a difference between life and death. Literally! With most people having issues maintaining their everyday life due to the hectic working environment and incoming emails, unwanted messages are only likely to complicate things further.
As regards to online marketers, there is a good set of rules disguised as email etiquette that recipients expect to be respected. One of those is not receiving any offers during working hours. Businesses keeping in touch with their clients and customers via email (which just so happens to constitute an overwhelming majority) need to be particularly careful when, what and whence they send emails. It goes without saying that the same email address will be used for all correspondence. It is only natural, therefore, to use that email address for that purpose alone. Private correspondence should be performed from a different email address, lest confusion takes over.
Finally, there is the matter of freelancing, the profession that has been on the rise for years. Freelancers collaborate with multiple clients on a more or less regular basis. Keeping track of all correspondence with various employers and for all projects is an arduous task indeed. Freelancers often use different email accounts to separate workflows and make things easier in the long run.
Email and Security
Last but not least, what happens when you lose your login credentials? If you don’t have a recovery email address — nothing at all. You will permanently lose access to your precious email account, along with all messages “trapped” there. This holds true for webmail, the more usual of the two choices (the other being a desktop email client), as it stores messages on provider’s servers. Desktop clients store all messages on your computer, fortunately, but are accessible only from your computer.
The usual issue multiple email account skeptics have cited the pains of logging into different email accounts, but the concern is unfounded. With redirection going stronger than ever and a multitude of email service providers offering one centralized inbox, all excuses cease to be valid.
All in all, using multiple email addresses has numerous advantages and not a single disadvantage. On top of maintaining your privacy, helping you organize private and business messages, keep track of jobs and projects and grouping promotions that might interest you, multiple email accounts also mean less time spent checking email. Use a centralized inbox to keep track of all addresses you need to check on a regular basis and use aliases for other online activities.
You may also like to read: 4 Tips for Identifying a Suspicious Email Attachment