"Just have multiple email address so you can give the appropriate address.
I have 3 email addresses:
Spam Professional Personal
Whenever a website wants my email for sign up or whatever, I give it my spam email. For resumes, its my professional email, and for everything else I give out my personal email.
What I then do is forward all my spam and professional emails to my Personal one. This way I just need to check one email account. If my spam account gets too spammy, I just create another one and forward the new one instead. Note that you'll still need to keep that first spam account around if you ever forget passwords to forums and such."
"I have my own domain, and use Google Apps. I have *@mydomain forward to me, and the rest of my family that uses it has their own username and aliases.
So I can arbitrarily sign up for sites with sitename@ydomain, and have an email associated with that site. When I get spam to that address, I know where it came from and can stop using said site entirely, and filter out that email :).
I also have, of course, a work address, and that is for work-related email. I only sign up for sites that are work related through that address (mailing lists and the like).
It does add the extra step of multiple accounts, but I like the separation of work and personal email accounts, since I work from home its one of the few separations I have between the two."
I have my main email, which I use for personal correspondence, which I know is unlikely to be abused by anyone. I then have my hotmail email which I use for MSN and websites which I sign up to which could be slightly spurious or send me junk that I don't necessarily want and makes it difficult to opt out of. I then have another email address which I deal with responses from my website and can reply to if I need to, which uses the domain of my website for consistency.
I don't find it at all cumbersome to manage them; I just have separate accounts in Thunderbird which checks all my accounts for new emails on startup and periodically. I also find it better to have the email separated rather than jumbled up in one big mess, and having to deal with different types of email with different folders."
I use a single Gmail account to read/respond to email. I have configured different forwarders to handle project or role specific emails (such as mypersonal@example.com and mywork@example.com), and then I've configured Gmail filters to label and handle email that comes in to those addresses appropriately.
For legacy email accounts that cannot be simply forwarded over, I just add them to my Gmail account as POP3 or IMAP accounts.
Finally, I configure my from addresses and verify that I own those accounts. All of that is in your Gmail Settings page and pretty straightforward."
Whether you use one address or many, make sure that you don't use HotGoth99@... in a professional context. This is the same, in my mind, as a business using hotmail or gmail. Domains are so cheap, at least buy one and set it up to forward to gmail.
