Do you have a joint email address with your spouse/partner?

[unlikelychump]

We've had one for 15 years now but it seems to have turned into a hindrance rather than a help. Part of a wider issue of course, but it has turned into just another inbox for me to manage with my DH having opportunity to read stuff (and not take action.)

If you have one how do you manage it, if you don't have one how do you manage admin stuff between you - just forwarding emails over?

(3 kids so lots of school stuff etc)

Who deals with it is easy. You open it, you action it.

Exactly this. It's much handier having access to the full conversation including our replies to refer back to if needed than forwarding individual emails on from one account to another.

Loving this thread.
Me and DH must be both quite elderly and weird! We share an email address for general day to day stuff and have individual ones if we ever need them. I manage all of them as DH doesn't 'do' computers.
By these standards, quite elderly means 55 and 52 but I'll own the weird... 😂

I don't really mean the ones who have a generic joint address for bills or school admin (although I've still never felt the need).

More the 'peter&[email protected]' crowd. I know people who have this and don't have their own email addresses (or Facebook accounts). There's your weirdos.

It never occurred to me to do that! It sounds in theory a brilliant idea - both have access to the same information and emails.

In practice that would never work with my husband 😂😂😂 Perhaps if both parties were very organized it would be a success.

We do and it's pretty ineffective. We both also have personal and work ones too, so the joint one is rarely used and often things get missed because someone read something and deleted it / filed it / it's lying unread in a load of spam. So we mainly use personal ones.

Basically I think it's a bit pointless but we probably set it up initially to be romantic / weirdos

No, of course I don’t. Why would I? It not being the 50s and all

Yes we do this.

We often have to email about our son and we have endless appointments. You can usually only add one email address so it's much easier to just have [email protected] and we know we always use that for anything to do with medical appointments for our son.

there's never any crossover as whoever reads the email just responds to it from us both

My (v elderly) parents have had a joint email address and now, after about 10 years, have finally realised that it's v annoying!

This is an interesting thread. I’d always assumed that joint email addresses were a hangover from the 1990s when home internet became widespread. It was more common for there to be one address per household as we didn’t do anything like as much online shopping as we do now. Over time people wanted their own addresses but some people eg my parents in their 80s never changed it.

i can completely see the benefits of a single email address for school/house related things but is suspect the conditions needed for it to work are similar to having a joint bank account ie similar attitudes and levels of organisation. When I was married I can just imagine it being another source of disagreement with one of us (husband) responding before discussing with the other (me)!

We have a joint email address as well as individual ones. Stuff to do with the house/cara/kids goes to the joint one.

I process all the kids stuff. Our agreement is that if he reads school/kids emails then he marks them as unread again so I know I haven't processed them. He has other things that he is responsible for processing, and if I read them then I mark them unread for the same reason.

That email address has an associated calendar where all of the stuff goes. If it's not in that calendar then it won't be remembered, and we each consult the calendar before adding anything new.

Joint FB, makes me cringe, that's definitely people with trust issues.

No! I have my own. He gets school emails to his own address too.

Yes for any school stuff , 4dcs in 4 different settings. House stuff ie bills , boiler service etc.
2 of the schools only email. Not parent mail etc.

We do also have our own ones though

I set ours up in the 90s as a family email, (of course DS never uses it now) but we've had it for nigh on 30 years. It's our main account although I would dearly love DH to set up a separate one for his hobbies/political stuff, but he won't. (Too much hassle, he says. He was in tech support! )
i have a separate subsidiary account.

We do. Shared calendar too.
It's purely for family life admin stuff. So bills, kids clubs, etc.
We both have individual email accounts and use those for remotely personal or individual.

I can't image why anyone would think it's easier to be forwarding emails around rather than having a single account we could both see the full conversation chain on. I don't want to have to remember to forward email the address for a Brownie party or football tournament to my OH. Or have him have to use my email address if he wants to quickly check an online utility bill. Much simpler for there to be a joint email address for that stuff.

What a joint email for shared life admin has to do with bizarre social media accounts, is beyond me. Surely it's more similar to having post addressed to both of you? Or do many people here object to letters addressed to "the parents/guardians of little Johnny" and things like that? Do some people think that a mortgage statement or rental contract with both names on means you can't ever get birthday cards or online deliveries in your own names?

Since email use became widespread a good 10 years before the likes of Facebook, and probably 15 or more years before iMessage and then WhatsApp became a thing it was, in my limited experience as a Gen X early adopter, relatively normal to have individual email addresses as well as group or joint ones for ease of communication and sharing.

After all, back in the mid nineties domestic email was mainly accessed from a web browser on a laptop or desktop - there was no access from a WiFi or 5g connected mobile device. So it made sense to have some stuff sent to a shared account. As technology developed and it became easier to access anything anywhere - late ‘90s / early ‘00s - the need for personal groups / shared mailboxes declined, and by the mid 00s it became an anachronism in a domestic setting.

But group emails adresses are still widely used - admin@, support@, customerservices@ and so on and so on. There was a brief flurry in the mid 00s for personal domains, and then everyone in a family having a [email protected] email address, and setting up other ‘disposable’ addresses became popular for controlling/limiting who actually got your actual email address. But that died out pretty quickly as well!

I find the couples having one FB account between them weird.

My cousin and DP do this.

My parents have a joint one. I imagine it was entirely my dad's idea as he is quite controlling. They also insist on putting me on speaker phone when I call them...which I hate!

I’m dh’s carer. I would go mad without “his” stuff coming to “our” email. We are old enough to hark back to the early days of email, too so it doesn’t seem weird.