I feel like I’m over-specializing my life, or at the very least, over-organizing my online life. For years I had a hotmail account that I shared with my husband. Yes, shared! When I started signing up for free this and free that, I decided to create my first gmail account to catch all that junk, but I really preferred using gmail over anythings else, so that quickly became my go to account. When I started my parenting blog ages ago, I used that as my main email, and it just naturally became my main fiction writing account.
Why would I need more than one email address, right?
Well, I’ll tell you. When you start writing M/M romance and then you email your kid’s teacher using that same email that’s attached to many erotic stories easily found with a quick google search, you quickly see the benefit. So I created my “Mom” email. When I got published, I created my professional email, and I’ve been using that one for quite a few things.
So, now I get updates to that email from all the sites I use for marketing: Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. That junk is now mixed up with all the other important stuff that needs to be easily found from my publisher, so guess what. I just created yet another email address.
PosyWrites@gmail.com is where you can find me if you want to email me. Now, I need to figure out how to weed out all the marketing stuff from my super important stuff.
I can’t be alone in the multiple emails accounts thing (Can I?), because the Mail program on my Mac was obviously designed for this job alone. If I had to log into each account separately, I’d never do it, so I’ve very grateful for programs like Mail.
How many email accounts do you have and how do you decide what goes to which account?
I have five email accounts.
-A personal one (for Facebook, friends, and my fanfic writing)
-A professional writing one (with my pen name)
-A professional career one (my real name)
-A spam email one (for signing up for all those great coupons and newsletters)
-Finally, one I made a long time ago for god-knows-what but is now mostly dead (guess I can scrap that one).
The worst part is, I do log on to them all separately.
That sounds so tiring, the signing in to separate accts. See, gmail sorta auto signs you in to so many things, much like Facebook does. It’s good, but it’s also very, very bad, which is why I like Mac Mail so much.
Well good to know I’m not the only one! I have four gmails currently– my first was my personal (real name) — for friends, family and when personal career stuff. Then I created one for my “fandom” name when I got into all that. Then last year I created my penname email for all writing and M/M stuff. And I have a fourth that is strictly for online ordering/signing up for sites. For all the junkmail that can come with that.
I am slowly phasing out the fandom one though. And I do sign into all of them separately–I have four tabs open on my computer, concurrently signed into all of the accounts, one per tab.