My boss told a long (and not very interesting) story about ordering his wife’s Valentine present online, and managing to intercept the purchase confirmation when it arrived at their shared email address, but then getting caught because the company also sent a shipping confirmation. (And no, the reason he gave for using the personal address and not his work address made no sense to me at all.)
He is one of two people I know who shares a personal email address with his or her SO. This couple is 60ish – the other couple is, I dunno, mid-30s or so. And of everyone else I have an email address on, it’s either a work address or it’s identifiably the person’s own personal address.
Now I’ve never been married, so obviously I’m not very good at sharing – but this just seems weird to me.
So who all shares a personal email address with their SO?
It’s like our checking account - we have a joint email for the house, and two personal emails for us. I find this a necessity, I mean my wife can’t know EVERYTHING right?. We are mid 30’s.
My parents do - but they also have separate email addresses for some things. I know they use the shared one for common stuff - financial and legal emails mostly, but also some personal mail.
I wouldn’t. Not a chance. I value my privacy, thanks, and while I would have no problem with my SO (hypothetical, at the moment) reading my email when invited to do so, I would assume that basic privacy applies.
No way. But we are of the generation that was exposed to the Internet as teens, we each came to the relationship with e-mail addys already set up. It would never occur to me to even have a joint address.
Well, I have 4 semi- or fully-active mail accounts.
One of these is our “home” account, which is shared. One is my work account which obviously isn’t, and in addition I have a Yahoo! and a GMail account.
My wife has (in addition to our home account) at least her own work account, and of course she may have some web-mail(s) I wouldn’t necessarily even know about.
Not sure if this counts as a “Yes”, “No” or “All of the Above” for the purposes of the poll…
Mr. Stuff knows the password to all my accounts, and I to all his (except his work account). But we never look at each other’s accounts, unless asked to. I’ve called home and had him log into my e-mail to get info that I’d saved there, for instance.
I would still call that a personal account though. By personal, I just mean an acct. where you could receive a confirmation email on a gift for an SO without the SO having immediate access to it.
In my experience, the reasoning among people who do this seems to be "We have no secrets from each other. Anything you say to me is going to be shared with him/her. " Well, in my opinion, that doesn’t make you a great spouse, it makes you a crappy friend.
I value my privacy, and I respect other people’s privacy. I also value trust. If I want to know what my SO is up to, I’m going to ask him, not read his email.
No sharing, if only for the gift-buying reason cited in the OP. We each have a Yahoo account, and I have a work address as well. All of our financial accounts are joint, but we don’t open snail mail addressed to the other, and any email we wish to share, we forward.
This is about the same for my husband and me. We have our own separate accounts, and while we both know the others passwords, we never log into anyone but our own accounts. I allow him into mine (or vice versa) in case one of us is the only one home while trying to get one of our computers fixed/ordering something cool from one person’s account/whatever and needs to receive email tech support/confirmation/order info/whatever. Not only do we have our own email addresses, we have our own computers, too. It’s just rare that we use anyone’s but our own.
I think I wrote my husband’s name on my main outgoing email - however, anyone who actually emails that address knows it’s really just me. I think I attached his name when I created it, since I made it on the morning of my wedding day, with a name that reflected my (soon to be!) shiny new last name. I just never bothered to change it. That was three years ago.
Hell no. Not only do I have my own personal account plus a work account (through my workplace), I also have four other webmail accounts (well, 5 if I ever felt like using my G-mail account) for things that are likely to attract E-mail spam.
I’d keep them separate if for no other reason than we each have an iPod with resulting E-mail updates from iTunes for music we might be interested in. Our music tastes don’t overlap much. I also buy him gifts online and trying to intercept confirmation E-mails would be a nightmare.
For one thing, although we share a physical address, we still communicate a lot by e-mail. (And IM. In the same house. Eesh.) Sharing an address would make staying in touch at work impractical. What the?
We don’t even share a phone line. His-and-hers cells only.
My best friend shares an email address (and IM accounts) with his wife, though. I can tell you, it puts a tiny crimp on communication. Imagine knowing someone for almost thirty years and then, when they finally take the plunge and get e-mail, you know that every single line you write to them may be reviewed by their spouse.
Only the most angelic of thoughts are ever committed to writing – I want to make sure that I’m still welcome to visit.
My husband knows little about the computer except that I sit in front of it a lot. We use my email address for any business he needs to conduct. And I do the typing for all of his correspondence. And I have to continually remind him that he needs to read it from bottom to top to make sense of a string of emails.
I could be corresponding with Osama Bin Laden himself and Mr. K would not only be oblivious to it, but even if he did know, he’d be unable to figure out what we were saying.
We came into our relationship (6 years ago) with our own accounts and the idea of creating a joint one hadn’t occured to either of us before. One thing we did though was delete the account we each had that had been used primarily for hooking up before we got together.
We don’t. However, we do share an ebay account and that can complicate things. I opened a separate one just to buy gifts, but I prefer to use the one with lots of feedback.
I think I might suggest a common account to my husband tonight. It makes a lot of sense to have one for the mortgage receipt statements and other household stuff.
Nope. No big deal about it, she doesn’t know my password but that’s only because Thunderbird knows it. She could open my laptop at any time and check my email (good luck finding them all, I’m not entirely sure how many addresses I might have). I don’t see the point of sharing an address, honestly. Doesn’t make any sense hardly at all.
Another vote for the “Hell, no!” The wife has a personal account and a work account. I have two personal and two work accounts. We both handle enough email every day to make a joint account a total nightmare, even keeping the work accounts apart.
