My (retired, not computer savvy) parents share a single email account that comes from their ISP. They don’t send or receive a whole lot of email, so the issue of “how many e-mails each person has to trough [?] through” doesn’t come up.
Weird. I have 3 email addresses myself, my gf has at least two (hers are work and personal. Mine work/personal/spam bait)
My husband and I share an email address that forwards all the email sent to that address to both our individual accounts. I can’t imagine actually sharing a primary account.
And of course any replies will come from my individual email address. (I was about to type “from one of our individual email addresses,” and then I realized mr. hunter never answers his personal email.)
Hell no you’re not. Mr. Athena and I are in the same house and we email/IM each other way more than we pick up the phone or talk in person.
What’s funny, though, is I keep thinking we need to get a joint account. Not for actual talking to humans, but for signing up for joint things. Like, we share an Amazon account so if we buy Kindle books we can both read them. Same thing with the Apple account we use for our iPhones. And it’d be handy to have all the utility/household bills go to an account we both use, and the Netflix account.
Someday, I will set up such a thing, right after I clean out the storage room and put all my books in alphabetical order by author.
My boyfriend uses my Facebook account all the time. His reasoning is “Why should I make my own when I can just use yours?”
My wife and I have our own accounts, but regularly read emails from the other’s account. They’re both loaded to the iPad email application, anytime we use the thing we see the mail from both accounts.
We have friends who email to one or the other ID, and neither of us are shy about responding from either account if it makes sense to.
My wife used my Facebook a couple of times, once she added friends I didn’t really want, so that had to stop, and quick.
Someone I work with dropped her facebook account when she got engaged and instead went with a joint account under a Frankenstein’s monster of a stiched together name of her’s and her boyfriend’s. It was horrifically cutsie and juvenile.
Any couple that has a joint email or facebook I will assume there are either serious trust issues or that one is a Luddite. Old people are grandfathered in. So to speak.
When we first got email, our provider only allowed one email address per account. Now, we’re allowed something like eight, and I have a separate address now but the shared address gets most of the emails. I suppose I could insist that my husband set up his own address - but what would be the point? He doesn’t read the shared email as it is- and this fact is so well known that his friends actually address their emails to me ( as in " Hi Doreen , tell husband ____) and most of the emails going into that shared account are related to other shared accounts - notification that one bill or another is due or confirmation that it was paid, Netflix, Amazon , various reward and discount clubs etc
My parents do this. They’ve been married for 40 years, and while Dad is somewhat tech savvy, Mom doesn’t like computers. Most messages are from old friends and are usually meant for both of them. Dad usually calls mom down to read her emails since otherwise she can’t be bothered. Hell, my dad will forward me emails if it concerns anyone I even remotely know.
My sister and her husband share an email account. I hate it - for one thing, I can’t always tell which one of them is actually responding because neither signs their name. Two, I won’t share anything really girly or personal via email since I don’t know who’s going to reading it. (My sister’s husband dislikes me and my sister is OK with being the Powerless Little Underling Wife in the relationship.)
They live several continents away, so as a result I don’t have much of a relationship with my sister any more.
When I was married, my ex and I had each other’s email log-ins, no big deal. But definitely separate email accounts. Family and friends just emailed both of us with anything that was of interest to both. More personal emails were sent to the appropriate account. We had separate (as well as shared) interests, email lists and friends - it was simply more efficient to have separate accounts.
You’re not crazy, just out of touch with the fact that other people have very different lives. 
Not that I don’t do the same thing, of course. I’ve always worked “leave when all the work is done” jobs, so non-essential personal contact is an interference more than anything, so when people talk about calling/texting/emailing someone during the workday there’s this voice in my head spluttering “WTF! Don’t these people have work to do?!”
My parents share one, which is used for private and work emails- but then, they also work together, and barely use it at all.
In fact, if I email them, the message is normally passed on via one of the staff, who has access to the account :rolleyes:
Well said! This is my thinking also!!!
If it’s young, otherwise tech savvy folks, this is generally my assumption-- somebody doesn’t trust the other person.
We have one shared account for family emails, but he and I have our own individual email accounts as well.
My stepmom used to read my dad’s e-mails and sometimes reply to them, which drove me bonkers. If I want to communicate with my own freaking father privately, shouldn’t I be able to do so? They certainly have their own e-mail accounts and are quite tech-savvy; they each have their own iPhones, and my dad, though he is 71, until he retired 2 weeks ago, managed the development and implementation of large-scale IT projects. I don’t think it was a trust issue with my stepmom, so much as that she is a complete control freak.
My in-laws share an account, which I also don’t really understand (though it doesn’t drive me as bonkers as my stepmom replying to private e-mails written to my dad). They are older, but both quite capable of writing and replying to e-mails from their home computer (and they do always indicate who is writing). The issue arose when my MIL was visiting last summer without my FIL, and because she didn’t know how to log into their e-mail account except from their home computer, she was asking us to send e-mails to people from our own accounts on her behalf. Which was kind of a pain when we didn’t know when they were going to reply; if it was after she left our house and went on to my SIL’s house, that meant we would have to forward things on to them if she wanted to be able to read them, etc. (To be fair, I don’t know whether their ISP even has webmail functionality, but still.)
So Tom Scud said “hey, why don’t we just set you up a nice free gmail account, and you could access it all by yourself, from wherever you happen to be?” She thought that was weird and didn’t really see the utility of it, but we finally talked her into it. I don’t know whether she ever logged into the thing after she left our house.
Interesting to see some of the assumptions here about people who do this.
My wife and I share an email account. We started that way, as some above have mentioned, primarily because it was pretty much one to a household back in the earlyish nineties. We are both tech-savvy (her more than me, but I know what I’m doing–Luddites we are not); we both email, a lot; we don’t have any particular trust issues in our relationship. Are we old? Depends on what you mean by old–we both recently turned fifty.
We have the computers set so that emails from my laptop come in as from me, emails from her laptop come in as from her, and emails from our auxiliary computer come in from both of us together–that’s a bit of a concession to the idea that we are not completely interchangeable, I guess!
We do both have separate work email addresses, but most people who don’t know us primarily through work use our personal email address.
We also share a telephone number (though as time goes on we are more and more likely to give out and use our cell numbers, which are different), and we share a physical mailbox.
Works very well for us. We’ve never seen any reason to change it, and haven’t gotten any complaints from people we correspond with. (Though for all we know they are sitting somewhere gnashing their teeth over this. But I doubt it.)
Ok, I’ve read it suggested here that sometimes a couple shares an email because of “trust issues”, which I take to mean that at least one partner doesn’t trust the other to have a separate account. Personally, I think that’s an untenable explanation, because it would simply be impossible to prevent the other person from establishing a second, secret account if they wanted to do so.
It seems to me that couples having “trust issues” are more likely to go in the opposite direction, to get separate accounts to maintain a bit of privacy from their partner.
I have to wonder how many have shared addresses also have solo addresses that they never talk about. Even some here note that their partner has one, but hardly ever uses it. SO YOU THINK! 
Here’s a worse case than just sharing. I get emails from “Rudy”, but Rudy doesn’t use the computer. Instead, it’s always from his wife. Why she insists on using his account name, especially for business purposes, I don’t know.
I correspond as an individual, but I understand that different couples have different boundaries. It has driven me nuts a couple of times when my dearest childhood friend’s husband has horned in and answered my emails to her. They share the account. He’s very controlling. I don’t say anything, since he makes her happy, but after 30+ years of marriage, I wish he could accept that her correspondence with her girlhood best friend doesn’t need his monitoring or input.