Shared email?

Filed under: Relationships
6 Comments

I've talked with two couples recently who read each others' email as a matter of course. (With full knowledge that this is happening, of course; I'm not talking about sneaking into each others' accounts.)

So now I'm curious: do you and someone else (whether a partner or not) regularly read email addressed to each other? If so, do you share a single address, or do you have separate addresses?

As usual, I intend no value judgments here; just interested in/curious about how different people do things.

6 Responses to “Shared email?”

  1. Jackie M.

    No. I haven’t fully adjusted to the idea of joint banking; shared e-mail would probably send me into anaphylaxis.

    My Mom & Dad do in theory share an e-mail address. But in practice Mom usually checks that one regularly, and Dad uses a separate one much more infrequently.

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  2. cj

    we always had separate e-mail addresses, but would frequently share information. And it was not unusual for people to send e-mail to me that was for both of us. Because of this, it was not unusual for my former partner to read e-mail addressed to my account, but I rarely had any reason to read e-mail addressed to him.

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  3. Nonny

    My husband and I don’t read each other’s emails because we feel that it’s an invasion of privacy. We do, however, have each other’s password in case there’s something we need access to while the other is unavailable, like keycodes for software products or such.

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  4. irilyth

    We don’t, but my parents did. (With two separate e-mail addresses, but they’d check each other’s when the other was busy or whatever.)

    Seems weird and wrong to me. :^)

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  5. Elaine

    We have a shared email address that is specifically for things like bill notifications, where it could be a problem if one person forgets or loses the message.

    However, for most of the regular senders it’s just set up to forward messages to our (very) separate individual email addresses.

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  6. Nao

    Separate all the way.

    There’s a couple of email lists that are relevant to both of us, but I’m more interested in them on a day to day basis. I’m the one subscribed, and I forward the ones that Stephen is likely to want to see to him*. (It’s worked so far, anyway.)

    That’s the closest we come to shared email, and it’s not all that close.

    *sometimes he reads the listserv emails over my shoulder

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