Putting All Your E-Mail In One Basket

from the good-or-bad? dept

The majority of people I know now use either their own domain name or a free yahoo or hotmail email address as their main email for personal correspondence. However, many people prefer to use their work email address for personal emails. Most companies don't have a problem with this (as long as it's not abused, or used for sending porn), but it does bring up some other issues. First of all, what happens to the email address when you switch jobs. Increasingly, your email address is your identity - and if it goes away when you change jobs, it's like a part of your life has been shut off. The other, perhaps bigger, issue is that most companies, these days, monitor their employees' email. So, all those personal emails are not private at all, and may be read by the company's IT staff or certain executives. I'm somewhat surprised that so many people use their corporate email accounts this way, since the risk of getting in trouble seems so much higher than the "cost" of getting a separate email account.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Frank, 26 Jun 2003 @ 4:04am

    email addrtesses

    I have been using pobox.com for years. It allows me to have my mail forwarded to what ever email I am using at the time. Costs $15 year.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      dave, 26 Jun 2003 @ 7:31am

      Re: email addrtesses

      or for about $12 a year (or less sometimes) you can get your own domain name, and use one of the several free all-in-one DNS services out there to foward *@whatever.com to your current address (the one i use you can specify where certain addressed emails are fowarded to, and there is also a catchall), and the plus side to that, is you get your own domain, unlimited subdomains, and infinite email addresses. But I admit, it's too much effort for most people, sometimes I just want my email to work, I don't want to wait a few days for the DNS/MX servers to update.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 26 Jun 2003 @ 6:49pm

    Why do people do this?

    1 - because their corprate e-mail gests less SPAM

    2 - because they don't know how to:

    a - buy a domain and run their own servers
    b - subscribe to service like oddpost.com

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.