E-mail is an imperfect medium. Our inboxes are full of both important messages and ads for spurious herbal remedies. And the tedious and time-consuming process of sorting the wheat from the chaff can result in accidentally deleting something important (such as that letter from your old college flame an InsureMe lead or other business-related message).

One imperfect but helpful method is to set up two e-mail addresses—one that you use for purchases and signing up for newsletters, the other for business and personal correspondence. Why do this? Well, because not everyone has a privacy policy that’s as good as InsureMe’s; when you sign up for a newsletter or buy something online, many will turn around and sell your address to a third party, which then often sells it to another, and so on. Pretty soon, everyone on the intarweb has your address and you’re up to your eyeballs in strangely worded offers for ED pills.

The two e-mail address approach can help in other ways, too. Some online services (like InsureMe’s) ask customers for a backup e-mail account, in the event that their primary one flakes out. (Known to happen; in fact, many InsureMe agents who use Yahoo free e-mail know first-hand the importance of having a backup e-mail.)