Ask HN: How many email accounts do you have?
I was thinking about this recently as a I work on a new mail client/server. I have one personal email that has a custom domain. 1 that's a plain gmail address and then a variety of random accounts I can't even remember but I guess were legacy or tests for new providers like protonmail. Then there's email address for whatever company you work for at the time. I realise I don't really want to hand out my personal email in a public setting and my company address is mostly for internal stuff. So where's public email?
Are we missing public email accounts? One's that you can just hand out anywhere? I have nearly 2000 aliases via SimpleLogin. Actual inboxes with their separate username@domain and password? Probably about 20, out of which I only really use around 10 and the rest are dormant or I don't really bother checking. I cannot answer the question as it requires context. But I will say that I have a personal domain with mail forward and when I register anywhere, I put domain@mydomain.com, so then I know who is leaking my email. For example ycombinator@johndoe.com. I have a lot of these emails, beside few others that also include business emails. Self hosting around 17 domains with a variety of individual accounts on each one. I create a new email on one of the domains to use for a specific purpose. For example, I use guitar@myname.com for guitar related stuff, aarp@anothename.com, Azure[1,2,3,4]@yetanotherdomain.com that I use for testing various permissions in Azure. Multiple emails for each of the kids domains and I have at least 3 domains per kid (3) and a few for the spouse. Everything works perfectly with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC setup. How many email accounts do you have? Unlimited on my self hosted mail servers across a dozen or so domains and up to 600 aliases on Fastmail across several domains. I do not have any that I could hand out anywhere as it would get blasted by junk and I would end up having to remove it unless I filtered on a set of GPG keys or something to that effect. Ward Christensen always gave out unique postal (made up apartment numbers) and email address to allow him to track who used his info for junk mail, etc. He really wasn't happy with NewEgg. Based on the responses it's a lot of people who manage their own email domain or servers. Not the norm. I think most people would not have aliases and things like this but would probably benefit from it. One on yahoo, Gmail, and iCloud. My yahoo account has been used for among other things my Apple account since 2003. It’s also the target of the “Hide My Email” feature where I create custom email accounts for websites. Eight, but half of them exist as long running test accounts for Kanmail (kanmail.io) so arguably do not count. I do use them for legit emails though, new services usually get one of four test emails. Three. I would rather have just one though. Going back I would have never setup a gmail. You can get access to
Gmail services using a regular email. My fastmail has 250+ masked addresses and about 10 aliases. Currently about* 4 or 5 on separate domains (self-hosted, and with third-party providers). At least one is a role acccount that I look after along with the org that it is for. I probably have 10 actual email accounts but I also have a few domains with catch-all. Then for "hand out anywhere" I just use iCloud aliases that I can disable.