E-Mail-Splosion

I have two different e-mail addresses for personal use, both of which are of the free, web-based variety. One of them I consider my main address, which I actually use for communicating with people I want to stay in touch with. The other is useful for signing up for site access or ordering things online, anything that will probably result in a barrage of spam. I know I’m not the only person who maintains two e-mail addresses for this very (or strikingly similar) reason, and it works out so well that I can’t imagine needing more than two.

Do you know how many e-mail addresses I have at work? Go ahead, guess. OK stop guessing.


It’s four.

I work for a government contractor and I have a corporate e-mail address maintained by my employer. My employer’s I.T. department supports Outlook Web Mail so I’m conveniently able to check this e-mail from anywhere teh interwebs are flowing: corporate HQ, government on-site gig, home. So that’s one.

(Random anecdote: I recently got an e-mail from the corporate I.T. department explaining that one of the many, many corporate e-mail servers would be offline for an emergency repair. Since users are segregated on different servers based on last names, the outage would only affect "people with last names beginning with Pb - Pz". Maybe one of these years I need to get my act together and go to the corporate Christmas party, and try to meet these John Pboppbbles and Jane Pzaczskywyczs. They sound interesting.)

I’m assigned to a specific contract working for a government agency, so I have a domain-specific e-mail account on their departmental server. This is how I do most of my intra-office communicating throughout the day. It’s the e-mail account that dings on the desktop when new mail arrives. (Except my GFE (government-furnished equipment) doesn’t include speakers, so I rely on the visual ding-quivalent, the little yellow envelope appearing in the notification tray.) It’s tied to the websites I’m responsible for maintaining and receives the error messages generated by the server and the feedback messages left by users. It’s really the only work e-mail I need to do my job, most of the time. That's two.

But I also have an intranet e-mail. The government agency my contract is with is a Defense agency, so I have an account on the military-wide intranet and said account comes with its own e-mail address, an address which happens to be only a couple of characters off from my main agency address. Sometimes people get confused and send e-mail to my intranet account instead of my main work account, and I have to specifically log in to the intranet to retrieve it, and I don’t know until I log in if there are any messages waiting for me or not. This is exactly as annoying as it sounds. That's three.

Finally, just the other day I realized that I also have a secret e-mail address. Obviously it was a well-kept secret if I wasn’t aware it existed, but I actually mean that in the sense of security clearance. The agency uses some secure applications which can only be accessed via a secure network, and logging on to that network involves obtaining a special hard drive usually stored under lock and key, entering a password for the drive, and proceeding from there. The drive has its own e-mail client and connects to an e-mail server that is completely separate from the everyday agency server. I have yet to do any work on the secret clearance application but in order to start looking at it the other day someone had to e-mail me the location and my credentials, which they sent from their secret e-mail to mine. I was somewhat surprised to learn of this new account’s existence, but really, I shouldn’t have been. I had already passed the point of more-than-I-or-anyone-else-could-possibly-need a while back, so everything on top of that is consistent with the theme, at least.

I’ve been working this gig for about eight months; I came into it with my corporate e-mail address and have acquired three more. At this rate I should reach the point where it takes me all eight hours of every day to log in and clear through all my various e-mail accounts some time in mid-2011.