Your four email addresses
To create a long-term presence on the Web, you’ll need a permanent email address that’s not tied to a university, workplace, or phone company. You want to still be using the same email address in five years’ time, when you’ve changed jobs three times and countries twice. But you don’t want to be deluged with spam. And you want to have an address that’s private and different from your institutional one. How to arrange all this?
The strategy I’d recommend is to have four addresses.
Disposable address
This is the one you give out to online surveys, when filling out forms, or to anyone you’re not sure you completely trust. It should be a free webmail address; I use Hotmail. You’ll hardly ever need to check it, and can dump it every few years as it fills up with spam.
Workhorse address
Your main public email address: the one you give out in emails, when purchasing online, subscribing to mailing lists, and so on. It needs to have good spam-catching capabilities and have a nice web interface, so I’d recommend Gmail. Any address you make public will get a lot of spam, so this should be the only address you post to a web page.
Professional address
If you have a consultancy or business, create a domain name for it and make an email address based on that. If you post it to your business website, protect it from spammers in some way. When you get a job, ask for your work email to be forwarded automatically to this address. If you set up other sites and domain names, those email addresses can be automatically forwarded to this one as well.
Personal address
Based on the domain name of your personal site. This should never appear on a web page, and should only be given out to people you trust, perhaps on personal business cards.
If you work on the web and use several computers, you can arrange for your professional and personal mail to be automatically forwarded to your Gmail account. This means you only need to go to one place to check webmail.
If you use your own laptop, however, you might want to install actual email software like Thunderbird or Apple’s Mail, and create accounts for your workhorse, professional, and personal addresses. You can download local copies of all your mail, which means you can read and write email when you’re not connected to the Net.
When you’re setting up your online identity, create your workhorse email address first; you’ll need it to register domains and set up web hosting. Email your entire address book for any other addresses you might have (from your internet provider, or previous workplace, or last educational institution) and let them know your new address; then cancel those old addresses. Good riddance.