public, personal, private

most everyone these days has more than one email. you've got the work account, the home account, maybe an account you funnel spam into, the one you use for gaming, the one you use for pinterest and facebook.

and, that's just for starters. on top of the accounts themselves, you have the aliases. say you're a salesman for several brands, so you've got an email address at each brand - helps the customers for each brand find you. your IT guys set it up so that all these emails are just aliases off the same email box, so they shuffle into one inbox for you. don't you worry your pretty little head about that.

you can have aliases on your home account, too. you might not even know this, seeing as how you don't have IT guys at home to set up your shit for you, but all the big email providers let you have multiple emails coming into one inbox. not just gmail, either. gmail does a really goofy "replying on behalf of" thing... do the others do that? not sure. i have an alias on my bellsouth account, but for some reason, i quit using it... maybe it did that "replying on behalf of" thing.

so, you have multiple emails. i have multiple emails. we all have multiple emails. what about all the abandoned emails? in compuserve, i was 70114,316@compuserve.com. wicked awesome, eh? along the way i've had a profs account, an aol account, a mail.com account, a hotmail, a yahoo, a bellsouth, a gmail. some i still have, some i don't have. what happened to the ones i used to have that i don't use anymore? is there abandoned email sitting out on the interwebs?

here's the thing, though. of all the emails i've had, none of them have been private. many of them have been "personal", but that's not the same as "private".

private email requires a good bit of setup and planning, care and feeding. lots of big institutions don't even go to the trouble - they'll farm it all out to google or someone. it is, as a matter of fact, highly unusual to have a private email server at all, much less in one's home, much less protected by live security people.

it is much, much more trouble to have a private server than to possibly carry two devices for emails.

we can talk another day about how two devices aren't even necessary.

and, if you want, we can even talk about how, if you head up the state department, and you effectively use email to accomplish your job, you cannot possibly not send classified information via email. there is no way, see? not. possible. this is because the head of the state department just simply wallows in classified information - all day, every day. you can choose not to use email for work, that's true, but if you use email for work and your work is heading up the dept of state - you will email something classified... probably multiple somethings.

but, i digress.

my point is that private email isn't the same as personal email. personal email is common. private is not - not at all.