I do not understand the analogy. Receiving snail mail is a one-way process, whereas e-mail is reciprocal in nature. If a shared e-mail account was solely for receiving information I can better understand the justification.
However, the issue for me is that if I e-mail my friend, I am not e-mailing his spouse… if I e-mail my friend, I do not expect to receive a reply from his spouse.
It’s weird–this is something that would have made sense to me, say, 15 years ago, would have been far harder to understand 6 or 7 years ago, but makes far more sense now.
As many have said, 10-15 years ago a lot of people didn’t have much need for email, so a shared account would have been sufficient for many couples. In the mid-00s email was probably my primary means of personal communication and my primary portal to the internet, so it would have been really impractical to share mine with anyone and hard for me to imagine anyone who cared enough to ever be online not taking the time to set up their own email account.
These days, though, it seems like I mostly use my personal email to sign up for or into other things. Nearly all of my personal correspondence is through Facebook. Most of what comes to my gmail account is “bacn” type stuff (offers from companies I order from, political campaign releases, notifications about bills, etc.). Except for the fact that you typically need your own email to sign up for things like Facebook and Twitter, sharing one really wouldn’t be a big deal.
Among my handful of Facebook friends who have “shared” accounts (“Chickanddude Johnson”), 100% of them are entirely used by the woman of the couple and the man isn’t interested.
My husband and I don’t have one shared email account, but we do have a joint email account, which we’ve found extremely useful. I’ve set it up so that almost all of my email accounts (including the joint account) forward to my main email account (except the ones I use for spam), and I can reply from my main email account using the joint account email addy, so if a person had corresponded with me just through that, there’d be there no reason to think that we have extra email addresses. Everything that goes to our joint account also forwards to my husband, and he has the ability to reply using our joint account, although I don’t think he’s ever done that.
Uses for a joint email account beyond the obvious:
When I forget the password to a mutual account (such as the credit card he signed up for), I don’t have to log into his email account to access the recovery email. I have his email account information and he doesn’t care if I log in, I just do this to make it easier since I primarily work from home and do a lot of editing in google docs, which makes it a pain to sign out of gmail.
To share important information when we aren’t in the same geographic location. He’s in the military and we’ve had to plan some moves, car purchases, and other important stuff long distance. If I sign up under his email, he may have sporadic internet access. If I sign up under my email, I may forget to forward every email about the move. This way, we can both access the same information.
Our joint account is a gmail account and I use the calender to share appointments that matter to us both, the documents/spreadsheets to store backups of important docs/videos/files, and the photo album to store pictures important to both of us that I don’t want ‘clogging’ up our main google accounts, but prefer to store in the cloud, such as photos of the condo we rent taken as we were doing the walk through. If something happens and he is unable to access my computer or email account, he can still access important files through our joint email account.
I also open his mail when he’s away and the letter looks important. He’s done the same for me when I’m in the field, but our circumstances are different than most.
Besides the forwarding and all, I also have other uses for my e-mail. Just at a brief glance:
I mean, does he want to go through all of these e-mails just to get his stuff? not to mention we are pathologically different on e-mail maintenance. Since I use my e-mail so much for everything, I have everything sorted neatly into folders and easily accessible. I clean my inbox out constantly and never have things marked “unread”.
His e-mail box on the other hand is full of e-mails that he never deletes. Some of them are unread. (!!) That makes me crazy.
Honestly, we’re two very different people and I think something like e-mail, which is so important to me, and not to him, needs to be separate, for us at least.
Email is a major method of communication for my husband and I. Neither of us likes to talk on the phone, and I work in a bullpen-type environment so I have to get up and walk off to find some privacy for phone calls, which is a pain. For email I can just sit here and look like I’m actually working while I send him an email with something stupid or funny.
Then again, we’re pretty independent folks. We weren’t even friends on Facebook until recently, and we’ve both had accounts for years. We’re also different in our management of in boxes - he does it and I don’t. 
It does, btw. I didn’t let my account lapse until I’d been back in the states for a while.
I always thought it was weird that my ex husband shared an email address with his wife and dog. While I doubt the dog ever received emails from the poodle down the street, he was in the email name and in the signature at the bottom of each email sent. IE SallyDickSpot@gmail.com. I also noted that our son didn’t make the name or signature.
My wife and I started a single Hotmail account years ago, when we had only one PC. A few years ago, I got a Gmail account, and she’s taken over the Hotmail account - plus, I have a few other scatterered email and social network accounts that. No trust issues at all - in fact, my wife knows my login info for my Google accounts.
I am a firm believer of separation of e-mail accounts. In fact, I prefer to have several different e-mail addresses just for myself I have five current ones for five different purposes. When my wife and I started living together (pre-marriage), one of the first things I did is create a separate account for her on the main computer and the secondary computer (a laptop). It makes so much sense to me. No mixing of browser history, of recently opened documents, etc. We both do a fair amount of work on the computer and it seems logical to me to keep the accounts separate.
We both have our own e-mail address, and also a forwarding address that sends the incoming message to both of our private inboxes. The joint address comes in handy when you write to someone about a family issue that we both need to know about, since many people just hit “reply” - when they reply we both get the answer.
Hello,
I’m a Toronto reporter with The Globe and Mail working on a story about adults who share email or Facebook accounts with their significant others.
Do joint accounts alienate you from your friends?
I’d like to talk to couples (preferably Canadian) who have joint accounts – why? Any fallout from friends? I’m also looking for people who were forced to email both parties in a couple to reach a friend, and got fed up with the lack of privacy.
If you fit the bill and had 5 minutes to speak via phone between now (Mon. Jan. 30) and Wed. Feb. 1, please email me at the contact below. The story runs nationally in Canada on Friday.
Thanks very much!
Zosia
Zosia Bielski | Reporter | The Globe and Mail
o: 416.585.5337 | a: 444 Front Street West Toronto, Ontario M5V 2S9
Usually we require that people who want to generate data or solicit comment from the Straight Dope community ask in advance before they wade in.
That being said, we appreciate your situation and so we are leaving this posting. Dopers may respond to it or not, as they like.