How many Email accounts do you have?

How many accounts do you have? For me, it's ... many. Apart from the company email, I am holding the following accounts:

Emails that provide capacity：

• The one provided by the ISP
  
• Hotmail free account
  
• GMail free acount
  
• Yahoo! free acount, with one alias
  
• FlashMail free account
  
• One personal mail server, setup with a friend
  

Email Forwarding Address(with Alias):

• University Alumni Email
• Account from e4ward, 2 aliases in total
• Account 4warding, 5 aliases in total

In terms of Email address, I have 15 address. Yet, what I am using actively are just GMail, Flash Mail and the personal mail server. For the others, besides Hotmail, all Emails will be redirected/forwarded to GMail, and GMail will keep a copy and forward to the personal mail server. Hotmail is just a 'sub-product' when creating MSN Messenger account, basically I don't use it at all. So for checking mail, I just need to check my personal mail server and FlashMail.

So why should we hold so many accounts? For me, this can help to separate the sender and control spam mail. I would give my alumni account to my University friends, for other friends I will give Yahoo! account instead. FlashMail is just for job hunting. And for other cases, especially when you need to leave an address when you subscribe something, I will simply use e4ward or 4warding. In case I was attacked by Spam Email, I can use delete or rename the alias address.

So which Email service are the best? Of course I vote for my own personal mail server (with QMail, with POP3 and IMAP4), very flexible. My second choice is GMail. If you can use the Label function wisely, that's a good service. Also it's my email backup repository. If my mail server are out of service, I can still get the mail from GMail.