I registered my own domain name and have just one account there. Then if I want other addresses for mailing lists and such I setup alias to that one account and give them out as necessary. I've turned off and quit using any other accounts.

Not that it's perfect, or even that interesting, but here's my e-mail setup:

1. "Home" e-mail. This is our (myself & my wife's) main personal e-mail address. On MS Outlook running on the home PC. This way, all personal mail related to trip planning, friends visiting, etc. is in one place we both can see.

2. My gmail address. I'm doing more and more correspondence with this address, which violates principle #1, but I keep it to stuff my wife isn't interested in seeing. Gmail is a million times better than the webmail interface of our ISP (the address in #1). This is also where all of my newsletters and other "semi-junk" go.

3. Work e-mail, on Outlook running on my work laptop. In seven years I've probably had only 10-20 personal e-mail discussions on this account. I like to keep work and not-work e-mail separate. This account is a complete nightmare despite Merlin's great advice here at 43F. But at least it's not a mix of personal and work stuff. That's about all it's got going for it.

This works for me. I use Gmail's labels to help keep stuff straight in there. A lot of what I get there is very junk-like, so I star the things that are most important so it shows up. Things like my credit card e-mails go to the "home" address, because I use MS Money on that computer, so the info is in the same context as the action.

I know there are a lot of "techier" solutions but I'm not that savvy. I

I recommend as few e-mail accounts as you can get by with, but as many as you need - yes, I borrowed that wisdom from David's thoughts on contexts, etc.

You can use Gmail features like "+ addressing" to approximate multiple addresses, with only one box to deal with.

--Paul

I have three address, and don't let myself accumulate any more than that.

I have my school address, which as a grad student means anything involving my classes and work (which also includes any extension or trade work in my case).

I have my gmail account for personal correspondence.

Last, I have a yahoo account as a throw away. I use this for internet garbage as well as newsletters, or if someone wants my email address, but I'm not yet sure if I want to provide them with full access to my regular life.

I find this separation works very well for me. Also, I know that I can keep my yahoo and gmail accounts indefinetly so I won't have to worry about transporting any of those contacts when I leave school. And once I do leave school for the "real world" I know that I will be provided another account to which I can transfer all those contacts.

I use my Gmail account as a catch-all. Filters are easy to set up to apply labels to mailing lists, there's plenty of storage, and it's easy to use overall. This way, I have only one e-mail address to worry about, so I won't forget anything.

At work, all my e-mail addresses go into one Exchange mailbox and I use Outlook.

I, like Flexiblefine, use Gmail as a catch-all. I have arond 8-10 email addresses that include ISP email, school email, and a few random Gmail accounts. Each account is then forwarded to what I refer to as my main Gmail account. If anyone ever asks for my email address, I give them my Gmail address, unless it's school related and serious, in which case they get my school address. Any old/rarely used accounts I never share so that I can eventually forget about them since all my important mail will go to the main Gmail account.

Once email arrives I have Gmail automatically apply labels to the message via the filters I set up. Some messages I never read, such as receipts from the iTunes music store, so I auto-archive those and mark them as read at the end of every month. I also filter mail that has any kind of attachment, and a whole bunch of other filtering junk. If I need to follow-up on a message, I star it in Gmail and keep it marked as unread so that I know exactly how much work I need to do. I also delete most of my email as it comes in. I rarely feel that a message is so important I will need to go back to it in the future.

I have various email addresses that are historical, that I neither cancel nor worry about. If an email comes in on them, I just add it to the pile (filtered in PowerMail).

But I do have 2 current email addresses, alan@mydomain I give to friends/business contacts/etc. and list@mydomain I use exclusively for mailing lists. This allows me to easily "turn off" list mail when I am away from the house and internet access is slow or expensive.

wow, i have an old msn/hotmail account i dont use, sbcglobal.net that is also dead.

i own my own domain, but i dont use the email there.
i've got Gmail as my catch all, just like most others above.
i hate healthy advantage of the labelling and filtering.

anything that is super important, i forward it to my yahoo account.
i check that one every few weeks to weed out the junk. but i never send mail from there.
everything is gmail.

I have a number of Gmail accounts, along with a couple of ISP addresses and what not, and the organization was getting to me too. What I've done is used gmail as my major interface for everything except my .edu address, which I keep seperatly mostly becuase I find it hard to send over smtp with Gmail from my campus email address (and conversely impossible to send campus mail over SMTP when I'm not on campus). And in any case it all ends up in Mail.app anyway.

While I think the Gmail filters are good as filters, the interface to create and edit filters is cumbersome and takes a lot to quickly add new dimensions to existing rules. Say, I have a filter for "extended family correspondence" and my uncle gets a new address, I'd like to be able to add the new address to the filter, in a couple of steps without a lot of scrolling. Mail.app's rules are great for this.

If the filters were marginally better, I'd probably use gmail more often for day to day emailing, but mail.app works just fine, and I almsot always have my mac with me, so it's not a great issue.

Cheers,

3 email accounts:
1. My own domain "me@me.com". This is the main one. It has good spamfilters. All personal stuff and business/purchases that I want notification on.
2. Yahoo account with alternative domain mapped onto it (cheap). "me@me.net". All subscriptions where I might want to stay informed, but don't want the noise to overwhelm me. Yahoo has some basic filters which help divide and conquer.
If I want to give out an email address at a conference, this one is fine.
3. Hotmail account: the toilet bowl for any online regs I make. I do visit & clean the toilet bowl, actually about as often as I clean the real one at home.

I can "get to zero" really fast on accounts 2 & 3. Account #1 I am trying to keep as lean as makes sense. Archiving once I read into a secondary folder.