How do you manage your email and IM friends and privacy concerns?

I want to know any tricks people use to manage their online friends. For example, do you keep separate email accounts for people that you meet at sex places like LPSG?

One trick I know is with yahoo accounts you can create aliases, then give them out to people you are not sure of to use when instant messaging (IM). Then you can just delete the alias if you want, like if they give it out to other people. I don't think you can receive email through you alias though.

Any other tricks people use to manage your friends?

 

IF they are really your friends why should you have to manage them?

 

Well, I used the word friend loosely. I mean people that you just met, and maybe want to chat, exchange emails with, or maybe webcam a little with. But you don't really know much about them, so you don't want to give out an email address that you use a lot, just in case they are crazy and post it all over the Internet.

 

Well, it takes a while to detemine that for me, especially online.

I have a yahoo account that I only use for LPSG and dating sites to which I belong. I have a gmail account for things like Williams-Sonoma, LL Bean, ticketmaster, HGTV contests, online horoscopes and silly stuff like that. AOL is the main e-mail that my friends and family have. I think only 2 people from here have that address.

 

It's easy to keep multiple addresses through services like yahoo and gmail. I don't trust yahoo's multiple alias system, as I've noticed it shows information differently through various parts of yahoo - 360, email address book, messenger - and some of them link back to the original account's personal info.

I use a generic cover account for sites like this, and only share my "real" accounts with a few trusted friends after I'd known them for a while.

 

Actually, its not the friends that need managing it's the junk and spam e-mails that I try to keep to a minimum.

I guess I went through a paranoid phase, so I made up an e-mail address just for online dating sites and this place. I'm not sure that was clear in my previous post.