What are your best practices when it comes to setting up personal or professional email addresses? I need to clean up my email addresses that have mushroomed over the years and am looking for a new email provider as I am not pleased with the current one I have. In other words I'm looking at beginning again, but hopefully with a better plan than I had before and a way to get there that isn't going to mushroom in another few years. Some questions I've been pondering:
Email providers and what to look for? Customer Support? gmail? fastmail? proton? other?
How many email addresses to set up? professional? personal? junk? financial? a combined email acc't with spouse for accounts that effect them both?
How do you secure your email accounts? If you have all email addresses with the same provider, my understanding is that could be an issue if the account is accidentally closed as associated email accounts might be also closed, so you'd want an email address or a phone number associated outside the main email account so you might be able to recover it. But I'd rather not have my phone number associated with an email address. On the other hand this means signing up with possibly two new email providers as a recovery option for both.
How to keep emails organized as you go thru the process of more new email addresses?
When can you delete old email addresses? So far I haven't deleted any old email addresses more or less because every once in while something pops up that has been important. I'm still waiting on going for a solid year with nothing popping up to delete a few of these.
I switched from gmail to protonmail a couple years back due to privacy concerns and dissatisfaction with how they run their business.
There were some cons:
- Android app is lacking (it sends way more notifications than it needs to and doesn't clear them if you read an email on your pc)
- 500 mb storage limit for free version means periodically sorting by size and deleting emails with large attachments
Other than that it's been fine. I have not had to deal with their customer support.
I only have one email address that I use regularly, other than my work email that never gets checked outside office hours. I only keep my previous email account open to view archives and to use for things that might spam me.
If you're using Outlook or similar you can set up rules to sort things into folders or automatically forward messages to your spouse based on the sender.
I have two.
I own both domains. Have owned both for 25+ years. Joe@JoeCompany.com Joe@Lastname.com
I use my local ISP for hosting. I am happy to pay the $30/month.
My Joe@GMail.com points to Joe@Lastname
When I finally retire, I will sell JoeCompany.
"best practices" includes selecting an appropriate name. I had a college kid interviewing for an internship and she had never changed her email name from hotchick65@whatever.com. She was quite embarrassed when I pointed that out. I think she got the job anyway but it was a long time ago.
For personal email, I keep two addresses. One for personal communication and a second for purchases and other interactions that might generate spam/promotional email. It’s not perfect but it helps cut the clutter. I also use a throwaway email that I rarely check when I’m forced to sign up for mailing lists or for one-off interactions like buying a car.
