Ask HN: What email service do you use for personal accounts and services

Trying to do some digital cleanup and after writing down all the services i'm using it's a bit of a mess. Different services uses different email accounts. In an ideal world it would all be consolidated under one email, but that seems impossible at this point.

Interested in your setups. Do you use Gmail or another service to sign up for stuff?

Bonus question: How many email accounts do you regularly use?

I moved everything to Fastmail. Sometimes I'll create an alias if I want to easily control a funnel of emails, but usually the one email address rules them all.

The big thing is to use an email address at your own domain so you can switch to new email providers in the future. Using an @gmail address is being unnaturally chained to one company.

I have been using Fastmail for many years and make good use of aliases to allow recognised items to be delivered into a identifying folders.

I recommend setting up an aliasing service no matter which provider you ultimately use. Blur or Anonaddy (sure there are others..) will give you a burner email unique for each new service you sign up for which forwards to your real email, and if one day one of them gets spammy or is sold to a data aggregator, you can just get rid of it entirely.

If I'm going to be actually corresponding a lot with an address (these days this is the exception in my email usage) I'll skip this middleman and make an alias/sending identity in fastmail.

To more fully answer your question, I believe I now have hundreds of unique email addresses in use. But it doesn't feel that way.

Started using fastmail about six months ago. Very happy. One account for a handful of different domains and addresses.