Using Multiple Email Accounts for Enhanced Security and Efficiency
Isn’t one (or two) email accounts hard enough? Why on earth would you want more? However, it’s worth considering whether using different email accounts for different purposes is actually a crucial part of personal and professional security. As we navigate through various online platforms, from banking to social media, the need to segregate our digital identities becomes increasingly apparent.
The Four-Email Strategy
The concept of using different email addresses for different types of online activities is a strategic approach to safeguard against identity-based attacks. Essentially, the idea is to give each email address a security ranking based on what you are using it for, and then to ensure you never use it anywhere else. There are different approaches to this, but one that I’ve been using for a while is to have four addresses—let’s go through each one by one.
Sensitive Accounts
Have an email address dedicated to financial and banking applications, or indeed anything that’s highly sensitive. I’d also include your password manager as among these sensitive applications as well. Use this email address for usernames, password recovery, notifications, and correspondence relating to these applications. Do not use this email address for any other purpose—this is essentially your top-secret address.
A good tip is to make this address a complex one—almost treat it like another password, perhaps by using your name and surname as usual but adding in a few extra digits and letters.
Example: Name.Surname.xyz142@outlook.com.
Personal Correspondence
This email address is exclusively for communication with friends and family. Sure, maybe these days it’s all mainly on WhatsApp and similar services, but sometimes you do need to send longer messages or documents, and it’s good to have a trusted address you can give out to people for them to use to get in touch with you if they need. You can also be a lot more playful with naming this email address!
Example: name.surname.personal@outlook.com. (OK, that was me being quite boring!)
Shopping and Promotional Email
This email address is for promotional emails and e-commerce activities. Yes, all those places where they ‘need’ your email address so you can continue shopping etc. Just stick in your special email address for promotions—it will then be much easier to filter out all email that arrives at this address and stick it in a special folder. More importantly, you’re not giving some random website the same email address that you’re using to log in to your bank or password manager.
Example: name.s.newsletters@outlook.com.
Professional Correspondence
One more email address, and no, this isn’t your company one (unless you’re self-employed). You’ll use this in future if you’re applying for a new job or if you need to give a colleague or contact a secondary email address for any reason but don’t want to give them the same address your friends and family use. Basically, this is the email address your employer will have ‘on file’ for you. Other uses for this would be things like correspondence with government services, lawyers, and other professional services.
Example: name.surname@outlook.com. Yes, you want this one to be your ‘bog standard’ email address, simple, clearly named, and to the point.
Equivalents at Work
So far, we’ve talked about your personal addresses, but you may well want to do something similar at work. If you often need to sign up for sensitive online services, buy items for work, handle invoices, etc, you may well want to use a different email address. Talk to your company about any best practices they might already have in place, or, if not, suggest having some other address that you could use for these more sensitive activities.
Set up Email Forwarding
While the idea of juggling all these email accounts may seem daunting, there are perfectly good ways to streamline the process. One effective method is to redirect all emails to a single inbox, allowing for centralised access while still maintaining the separation of correspondence. Most email accounts will allow you turn on email forwarding to easily do this.
Using Aliases
Another efficient technique is the use of email aliases. Many email services allow users to create aliases that act as different email addresses but automatically funnel incoming mail into the same inbox. This method provides the benefits of multiple accounts without the need to actually create and switch between them.
Sending Emails
If you’ve set up email forwarding, or used aliases, then you will be receiving all your emails from the various addresses into a single inbox. However, you will still need to be able to send emails as if they were coming from those addresses without having to log in separately to each account. Most good email services nowadays allow you to do this, selecting the ‘From’ account when writing an email. Just be careful you do pick the correct email address, especially if replying to an incoming email—usually, it will be the ‘default’ address that will be used to compose a reply.