Emails and Identity

Internet identity is usually tightly coupled with an email address. When I am using an online identity I try to limit the types of information I consider public beforehand. That's much easier to do when you have separate email addresses for your public "profiles".

In order to do that effectively one needs at least three email addresses these days:

• an address for actual correspondence with friends

  I use a short version of my real name as a display name when sending emails from this address.

• another email for registrations in internet services

  Online services offer to scan one's contact book to find if one's friends use their service too. I never agree to do that. But I can't control people who have me in their contact book. When I use separate emails for communication and registations, it will be hard to match these two emails automatically by scanning others' contact books.

• and one more address for legal entities

  If an organization has my profile that contains anything that identifies me as a citizen (e.g. social security number, passport number, etc.), this organization has a "foreign key" to me-as-a-citizen. It potentially means they have a lot information about me. I want to keep this fact in mind when talking to them, so I use a separate email with my legal name (as written in passport) as a dispaly name in this case.

So many accounts... I'm lost

It will be very hard to manage so many separate mailboxes. That's why I prefer to use aliases when one mailbox just has many email addresses.

That means I don't have to think about my identity too often. Just when:

• sharing an email address with a person or service
• composing an email
• replying to an email (the address used in to/cc is picked by default in this case)

Public email providers usually provide aliases support only together with custom domain name.

Own domain

As I've mentioned earlier, public email providers don't let you use aliases without a custom domain name.

But there are other reasons to buy your own domain for emails. The main one is to avoid email provider lock.

You may need to change your email provider in future. If you use your own domain name, you'll be able to do that without loosing your contacts. This is especially important if you'd like to stop using an email provider for privacy reasons - you'll either need to loose your email address or continue sharing data with them in case of forwarding if you don't own the domain.

Common sense:

• The domain name shouldn't identify you.

  Just pick something abstract pretending this is an email provider :)

• The domain name shouldn't be used for anything besides emails.

  Don't host your blog or portfolio at this domain (but do host an index HTML page with a logo).

• Don't forget about WHOIS privacy.

Once you start using your own domain for emails, it's easy to switch from one provider to another. The main criteria for choosing an email provider I have is whether they make money on ads or not.

Even more

Email addresses you might also need:

• an email with a nickname (that can't be linked to your real name)

• an email for registrations where you don't share your real name

  Keep in mind that you'll probably need to share your name if you start using paid services. So it might make sense to use the primary registration email in this case.

• an email for professional identity

  Well... I actually use my personal and corporate email addresses for this.

• an email with a fake identity