Should you have more than one email?

I know you probably find it difficult to maintain the one email you have already. Some of us don’t even check our mails regularly, some only check their mails when they’re told to check their mails for something they may have been sent or should have seen.

Your email could be your key into a lot of important stuff, as you may already know. Your social media accounts, your bank accounts(for those using online banks), your health records, your games, education, etc. Your email is linked to everything, if you think about it. So, having to look though a lot of random emails to get to the important ones, maybe due to using some websites that send you spam mails claiming to have offers you might be interested in. Or some scammer just wanting to gain access to your life by sending you some phishing link.

Have you ever wondered what Bill Gates’ personal email address was?

Well, you might search the internet and get some emails that look like they might be his personal email but those are just emails that he opens to the public, that are most probably managed by other people who would filter those emails and reach out to him when they find something interesting. Imagine him having to surf through millions of emails, just to locate some grocery list sent to him by his wife. Or someone impersonating his wife and sending him mails, pretending to be her.

Having multiple emails could help you keep separate parts of your life separate, helps you filter out the nose and get the important stuff. When you open your personal email, you expect to see mails from familiar entities, like your family, bank, school, church, etc. Then when you open your work email, you see stuff relating to work, meetings you need to attend, etc. This helps you keep things in order and you know where to look if you’re ever looking for something.

Making your personal email public could also open you up to really big threats. Imagine someone wants to gain access to your facebook or instagram account, for example, or even your bank accounts. Since they know your email address already, they might just need to guess a few times to get your password, depending on how predictable you are or your interests. I’ll talk more on this in another post in the future.

Having different emails for different stuff could also help you trace where an attack comes from. Let’s say only your work colleagues know your work email. The moment you find out that something fishy’s happened to it, the first set of suspects that come to mind are your those few people that know it. So, you don’t just go around accusing your family members and just keep an eye on the work colleagues that might have access to your computer or work email.

Thanks for your time.