As we all know, everyone has thier own way of doing things. The best way to learn is to look at how others are doing it and decide on your own. That is the purpose of this topic.

Some store owners perfer the ease of 'one' email account. Everything goes to and from this one account. Some store owners have over ten or twenty different email accounts, one for each thing you can think of. Which way is the right way? There is no 'right or wrong' on this one. It's all a matter of personal preference and organization.

How many different addresses do you use and what are they for?

We currently use the following:

payments@ - This is for paypal payments only.
sales@ - This is for all sales/presales related emails (order confirmations, etc)
support@ - This is for customer service, RMA's, other support issues.
services@ - for thirdparty services (to keep them seperate from customers emails)

In the past we also had quote@ (for customer quotes), paypal@ (for paypal payments), helpme@ (for customer support), rma@ (for RMA's), along with some others.

We are re-evaluating our email configuration and have not decided on the new setup yet. Hopefully your responses will be a helpful reference for both myself and others in the community

Right now, just starting I only have the admin email but I have many aliases setup and rules that deliver each email to a certain folder depending on whom it was sent to.

My list includes

Affiliate
Froogle
Links
Merchant
Orders
Paypal
PPC
SEO

I have several email address. The only reason that I have several is to let me know what, where and when my customers are doing or want. Also when they come into my Outlook Express I can apply filters to each of them to sort them into the proper folders.

Sales
Info
RMA
New Order
Service
Catalog

I feel this helps keep me organized...and on top of things...

I want to be able to keep the Priority Mail away from others that mostly are advertising email...

We use:

Sales
Info
Feedback

As far as organizing the emails, thats crutial. I created folders for each subject.

I have
admin - ofcourse for website related and communicating with MC. (they come to know who i am just by my domain name)
service - for Customer service related (used most often)
wholesale - for wholesale orders/customers.
ebeadstore - for company communications like newsletter (haven;t produced yet, but i use this email a lot for other things if my company needs to communicate)
order - for new orders only.
privacy - dedicated to privacy concerns from customers.

* merchant (anything from merchant account or pure $$$ related.)
* paypal (obvious)
* orders (obvious)
* contact
(inbound from website form... I never actually post this Email. Though once I resspond from it, individuals will have it.)

* customerservice - this is MY customer service... not for customers OF mine. That is, I use this when I order something or interact with my vendors. Inbounds are filtered into folders as necessary.

* author (my product is a book, so there's one just for notes to author.)

Scott

I think multiple emails is essential. It makes the customer feel like the email is going to the right place for their problem/question. It also gives you a good reference right off the bat as to what the email is about and how to organize it.
We currently have
Douglas@
Donna@
Thomas@
Ben@
Sue@
Strapworks@
Support@
Custom@
Store@
GDN@
Feedback@
Affiliates@
Authorize@
Friends@
PayPal@
And they are all used pretty often. It helps us quickly seperate certain problems from questions and also automated emails go to their own email address (Authorize and PayPal) and are automatically stored away.
One other recommendation - SAVE ALL YOUR EMAILS! You never know when you will need to know what a customer wrote, what you wrote back, or information off an email you received. It takes up so little room to store emails that it should be done, especially with Outlook.
My Two Cents

Strapworks good point...

ALWAYS maintain a DB of your emails sent and recieved.

It's a crazy world out there... haha.

We keep all email as well. I just setup archiving to archive anything older than 6 months and when the PST files hits close to 700MB I burn it to CD and start a new one. Then I can always recover a email no matter how far back it was.