I just want to write a little bit about my main email address at yahoo which is now already reach approximately 12000 unread emails (and still increasingly) counted in my inbox and some spesific filtered folder. Thankful to God, I don’t use email client software which is saving every single email at local harddisk. If that amount of emails converted to gigabytes and I want to use self-hosted email service, I don’t know how much space that I must spend for keeping all 12000 emails.
Where the 12000 emails came from? Well, I’m a quite easy going as an internet user. I like to try every service that I consider it as ‘necessary to try’ including free offerings, new internet services, quizzes or competition, mailing lists with a specific topics that may make me curious ect. That make me easy to register and applying for everything with my email address. Seems quite stupid huh? Yeah… alright, that’s a quite stupid behavior and no doubt, it cause my inbox just like a unsterilized agar medium which culturized by various species of microbes, from the beneficial to the useless one or even parasitic.
That 12000 emails came from approximately 200 emails a day. A half of it was spam and unimportant postings from unimportant mailinglist, another 1/3 is FB notification and the rest is the truly meaningful email. Well, if you know the standard procedure for using email address for beginner is including some of this points:

• Set all postings from mailing list as a digest (remember, this only applied to yahoo which isn’t knowing ~yet~ threaded postings, I love gmail for this fascility).
• Enable spam filtering tools to reduce the amount of annoying spam to our inbox.
• Disable mail notification from services like FB or FS if that annoy you a lot.

U know what, none of those step I apply for my email addresses with some reasons. Setting mailing list to the digest mode sometimes break the HTML layout of every single post in it. So, the email will be shown as a simple html message and that’s more annoying for me. I like to read email with original layout as it was sent by the author, because It can make us appreciate how the author beautifies the layout of that email. Another reason is, spam filtering can become a stupid tools that trapping our important email to the spam folder. Sometimes verification emails from our newly registered internet service or even some important email from our colleagues fall into spam folder and we don’t recognize that. The last reason, I don’t annoyed by FB notification at all. This attitude of me make me need a giant space for bulking received emails.
For that purpose, the two most popular email service, gmail and yahoo already fulfill that needs. Otherwise, I’m still using common email addresses at yahoo and google, because for the last couple of years, I think I still don’t need a fully personal branded email address which is using my own domain. I have a personal email at cmsku.org (which I set quite similar with the subdomain I use for my previous personal blog [ardee dot cmsku dot org >> ardee at cmsku dot org]), but practically I never use that email. Even for business, my yahoo and google email addresses quite enough effective to fulfill my needs.
Maybe using email address with our own domain can increase our personal branding. At least, some advances tell us about it and practical example for the students from a university, using institutional email address like blablabla@students.itb.ac.id will be more-appreciated by another international university/institution when they need to contact them officially. Self-domain email address also related to the reputation of ‘the man behind email address’. The popular myth said when you use a personal domain email address, people will recognize you as a more reputable person who able to make his online identity branded or exclusive. But another myth then said, using personal domain means using our own resources.
Those myths will be a history as the third party email services now provide email services with our personal/institutional branding. I don’t know well about Yahoo, but Google serve their user well with Googleapps fascility. Of course it is applicable for some advance users who knowing how to control their domain service and the server we’re going to use, and here’s the prices of sql servers so we can choose one for our domain. But without that, we still can also make our self hosted email auto forward the email to our third party email (for receiving), then we set the third party email service to post our email with the address of our self hosted email. Practically, using third party email services like yahoo or google, as my friend told in his article about site hosting efficiency, will drastically reduce our need for hosting space. If you need a private address, those email service providers will be quite reliable to fulfill our need then.