digital account segmentation

28 Mar, 2025

Writing so much about multiple selves, contexts, and platforms makes me think it's about time to walk the walk. However, I struggle with how to best do so. Your stories and recommendations for how to navigate ownership of email, domain names, and other digital accounts could simplify my struggle. Asking public questions about that could encourage outsized benefits beyond my sole purview, whether in the form of email replies, blog posts answering them, or otherwise.

Since many of my questions apply to many of the account types I'm curious about, I organized my post into separate lists: types, generic questions applicable to any or all of those accounts, and account-specific questions.

Feel free to do any of the following:

• Answer as many of the following questions as you wish, whether in your head, in writing, or somewhere else online
• Assume that every question also asks "Why?" at the end
• Inform me of any possible improvements for this voluntary questionnaire
• Remix this list elsewhere

Digital account types

• Email
• Email aliases
• Domain names
• Social media
• Blogs
• Websites
• Apps
• Anything else

Generic questions

I'm listing these below such that they can apply to any or each of the above.

1. What purposes do you use any specific account for?
2. Which providers do you use?
3. Which providers are you looking to switch to, if any?
4. How many of any account type do you have in total, approximately?
5. How manageable do you find any of your account collections?
6. If you use multiple providers for the same type of account, which do you prefer?
7. Do you prefer having one or multiple of the same account type?
8. What stories do you have behind your accounts?
9. How do you categorize (the contents of) the accounts of any type?
10. How much can your digital account(s) be tied back to your real identity?
11. Do you use any pseudonyms for any of your accounts?
12. How often do you review and clean up your accounts?
13. Which plugins or other tools do you use with any of your digital accounts?
14. If you regularly delete your accounts, after what amount of time or activity do you delete them?
15. Have you ever had to merge or consolidate any accounts?
16. Have you ever lost access to any accounts?
17. Do you schedule your content for certain days, times, or intervals?

Specific questions

Email

1. Do you use email clients, webmail, or both?
2. Do you prefer email clients or webmail?
3. What tools do you use to deal with unwanted spam or subscriptions, if any?
4. How do you organize your email categories per email address?

Email aliases

1. Have you ever run out of available aliases under your current provider(s)?
2. What purposes do you find too critical or sensitive to use aliases for?

Domain names

1. What tools did you use for finding or choosing a suitable domain name?
2. What unused domain names are you sitting on?