How many e-mail accounts do you need?

Apparently the answer to that question, for me, is eight. That's right, eight e-mail accounts. Some are business accounts, some are personal accounts.

I did a count of my e-mail addresses after reading about Google mistakenly taking down some customer e-mail accounts some time back. For some people, not being able to access their e-mail account, even for a short period time, was devastating.

I feel for people in that position. As I've mentioned before, I'm very dependent on e-mail since that's the way I communicate with most of my clients.

So just a piece of advice: Have more than one business e-mail account. Maybe your main account is tied to your website domain while a back-up e-mail account is with your ISP. Maybe you have a third account with Yahoo or Google.

By having multiple e-mail accounts with separate companies, if one account goes down, you can still contact people through the other and let them know you're having some problems if you find that it will last more than a day.

I had kind of assumed people in business had something like this in place, but after reading about some of the people who were affected by the Google problem, I'm not so sure anymore.

Since e-mail accounts are so easy to get, make sure you're covered.