What is needed here is a change on how we should look at our email
addresses.

Do you give your home phone number to a client? Do you give your
business phone number to your parents? If not, then why should you
give your personal email address to a client and your business email
address to your parents?

Let's expand this further. Why should you be subscribing to a mailing
list with your personal email address? Why should you be the one doing
the routing of incoming emails? And, worse, asking the originator of
the email to, say, prefix the subject.

Email addresses are much cheaper than phone number. For each
occassion, you can afford to give out new email address. For example,
I use a different email address for ruby-talk mailing list than the
email address I hand out to friends, and to co-workers, and to my
parents.

This way, I'm not doing the routing of incoming emails; they do by
sending emails to the email address I gave them, their emails will
land on the mailboxes I want without me doing no further configuration
changes.

I feel sad that email addresses in this age of cyberspace are still
treated as if it is as expensive as a phone number. They are cheap,
dirt cheap.

Imagine this: work / yourname.yourdomain, friend / yourname.yourdomain,
ruby-talk / yourname.yourdomain, newegg / yourname.yourdomain.

If your organisation is still in the backwater, giving you only one
email address, instead of a sub-domain, that's OK. That's just for
work, right? 

OTOH, for your personal life, you can get a subdomain for free from
various dyndns providers, and start churning out email addresses.

I am doing this. And I notice one other member in the this mailing
list is also doing this. Come on, we are geeks here. Revolution starts
from us outwards.

YS.