A Quick Guide to Your Personal Email Address (2020 edition)

Your email address is probably now the most important piece of information people should know about you. You can change countries, employers, your legal name, sex, get a new phone number, but your email address could always be a reliable way for people to reach you. Your personal email archive is a story of your life. You can find there a receipt from the 10-year old purchase, postal address of an old friend, the name of a hotel where you went on vacation, etc.

I realized that long ago, and I’ve been able to maintain the same unchanged primary email address for the last 25 years and to keep an archive of all my email correspondence stretching back to 1995.

In the beginning, it required some serious technical skills. For years I used to run my personal mail server running Sendmail, SpamAssassin, and IMAP server. I also maintained the supporting infrastructure of DNS, firewall, backups. In modern days you do not need to do any of that. And yet I see some very basic common sense email practices people fail to follow. In this post, I will try to summarize my way of doing email.

Best Practices

Your email address is part of your identity. It should not be associated with your work, ISP, or current email provider. You should be able to change either of these and keep your email address. Periodically paging through my address book, I see friends addresses go through a progression of aol.com, att.net, yahoo.com, somecorp.com, gmail.com, domains. In contrast to that, my email address stayed the same for the last 25 years.

Keep your work email separate from personal email. If you change jobs, you should be ready to turn over your email address at the door. The company will have a right to examine your mailbox. Any personal information left there will probably be unrecoverable. Even if you do not leave the company, your email correspondence could be subpoenaed as a part of a lawsuit. Some companies have an email retention policy, and all messages in your work email account may be preserved even if you deleted them.

Email is personal. I see some spouses or even families sharing email accounts. It is great that you trust your partner, but frankly, it is so cheap to have a personal email address it is not worth sharing. Also, you might have different interests and not so enthusiastic about reading his or her messages from the cat-lovers mailing list. It is also a security issue. The least computer-literate participant will be the weakest link in your shared account security.

Keep it secure. The email may seem ephemeral to you, but your email address is often used for password recovery or access verification to your other online accounts. Hackers may compromise your bank or other financial accounts by gaining access to your email.

Do not delete anything. Email storage is cheap, and frankly, there is a little reason ever to delete an email. As of the time of writing, most email providers include 10–15Gb of email storage with the basic account. This amount of storage is enough to preserve a few decades of your emails. Archive everything. I have my email archives going back to 1995, and it is super handy to be able to look up some contact name, the date, or some other detail that otherwise will be lost in time.

Stop worrying about spam. Trying to hide your address or publishing it as “john at example.com” is silly. Your address will sooner or later be exposed and will be re-sold to a legion of spam senders. The good news is that modern-day anti-spam filters are pretty good and you will barely see any actual spam in your inbox. I want people who want to reach me to be able to find my email address. I, personally, do not find the email (at least from humans) intrusive. If I deem a message inappropriate or non-relevant I can always just ignore it. It takes a couple of clicks to permanently block the sender. I might not want people to call or text me, or show at my front door, but by all means, everybody is welcome to send me an email. The caveat is that I do not promise to answer it.

For Advanced Users

If you own a domain used for personal email, consider if you want to have other people besides you using it. For example, if you and your wife have addresses john@example.com and jane@example.com, you are stuck to using the same email provider. If you want to switch to say, ProtonMail, while she wants to stay with her FastMail account — that might not be possible.

Most of the email nowadays is generated by robots. Receiving a missive from a real human being is a rare treat. These are important and should not be lost in the torrent of notifications, receipts, and updates. I have a personal email address that I give to my friends and do not use it on any web sites. The mail arriving at it is high-priority, and new messages trigger instant push notifications. The other email address I use for web sites and online accounts, and I check less frequently.

Summary:

1. Buy a domain for your permanent life-long email address. As you change your email provider you can redirect your domain and keep the same address.
2. Host your email account with some reliable and reputable provider. I recommend ProtonMail or FastMail.
3. Secure your account with 2FA and encryption (if supported).
4. One domain per user (do not share).
5. Do not delete messages — archive.
6. Set up a backup procedure to regularly back up your email archive.
7. Optionally set up two separate email addresses: one which you give only to humans and one which you use to register on web sites.