Copyrighteous

Personally, I've found shared email addresses bordering on creepy.  I dislike writing an email to a specific individual knowing that it is very likely to be read by {not the recipient}.  If I were to talk with this same person one-on-one it isn't like they'd stop the conversation, invite their "other half" into the room, and then resume the conversation...

If one feels a need for technical or organizational methods to "keep each other honest" ... well, then it's time to suspend the relationship.

I don't buy the keeping each other honest thing. And as techies both my boyfriend and I have our online identities associated with our email addresses and have for over a decade, since before we met.

The article does bring up some good points about sharing of financial obligations where there is a single email associated with an account, flight bookings and shared logins (our tv has logins for netflix and hulu for instance, and it's useful to share that account data).

Of course this can be handled by an alias that emails both of you, which is what we do.

Our setup is much like Elizabeth's, but most end user email setup really doesn't make this obvious. I am constantly joining volunteer groups and such who solve the "shit, more than one person needs to read email to our group" by setting up a new Gmail and making all of the group volunteers log into it periodically.

If the major email providers (so, Gmail, Hotmail and the ISPs) provided some intermediate alias creation somewhere between an individual's account and a whole separate list infrastructure, that would help solve that problem for a lot of people. (Gmail could really do with developing a system to let people check each other's email accounts without each other's passwords in their Apps for Your Domain space too.)

As for us, my husband's email was at my personal domain for many years. I didn't really like that, now he has his own domain that I chose for him. And I admin our servers.

Yeah, we have an alias as well that goes to both of us.

Heh, nice one!

Of course, the technical knowledge is so unbalanced between Maria and I that in that regard she is quite in disadvantage. I admin her laptop, while she still thinks "my user doesn't have a password" (autologin), but sometimes we've been close to the "why won't you give me your user password", when she needed to log into my computer at some point.

I guess it's hard to explain.

Mary, why not simply get a Google Groups list? They can be set to private, IIRC.

It can't be set to private from Google.

We used GPG database and not sharing public e-mail adresses list. We shared to GPG link and public key.

I think shared email addresses dates from a time when computers and ISPs were more expensive than they are now, as well as less used. They were a way to save to a little money as much as anything.

Today, most of the shared addresses that I see belong to people who make very little use of the Internet.

Foo Communications uses just one email account for all its work. All the directors have it set up in their prospective IMAP client (Thunderbird 3.0) and we get three times the spam checking, and it keeps us honest too. More importantly, nobody can be out of the loop.