I use a unique email for every point of contact. It's fairly easy for me to do because I admin my own email server. Find a provider that offers decent support for disposable email addresses and you'll be in a good starting place. Whether it's for privacy or security, you really *don't* know who you can actually trust yet if you're only using a few emails. Family members can be hacked or hit by contact-scraping malware or just "share" your email with some stupid random online service that sends digital birthday cards or something. Same goes for "trusted" companies. The *only* way I was able to discover that Apple and TD Ameritrade sold me out is because I gave them unique addresses. So my advice to anyone working with a limited number of emails would be to first divide their use between "public" and "private". Any random person you meet, any new site you sign up with, any family member who still doesn't grok technology (including privacy concerns), gets a public address. It should be considered a sacrificial email, and you should be fully committed to getting rid of it when it becomes a serious source of abuse. All the other private addresses get allocated with increasing levels of trust. At the lower level you might add the web sites you use regularly that don't appear to have spammed you in the last 6 months (or whatever). At the upper level you might put banks and lawyers and anyone else that represents a *serious* breach in security if that information starts showing up in the hands of spammers. But, really, you're still just groping around in the dark unless you're able to do one-to-one contact tracing. The more people that get any single email address you use, the larger the attack surface area you present. If you understand why it's a bad idea to share passwords, you should understand why it's a bad idea to share email addresses (and any other forms of identification, whether or not they can be directly used as a means of contact). 52aaf355343574c2ac82eafb49ebb3290c547822ff51d068e9d5a1670dd0c43c