You see, my mum is an actress. When people ask "what sort" - I could tell them about the award winning short films she has been in. Or the London theatre productions she's starred in. Or the TV commercials you've almost certainly seen.

Instead, I show people the photo I have stored as her phone contact.

Somehow, my mum has found a niche playing monstrous women. She's been an alien shape-shifter who devours people, a cannibal, a nightmare fragment.

If you fancy a night of my mum scaring the crap out you, buy her DVDs!

Happy birthday, mum!

We both want to see the bills, and we don't want to rely on the other forwarding us an email, or sticking the PDF into a shared folder.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Couples of Twitter! How do you handle emails for "joint" things?

Like utility bills, hotel reservations, and other domestic accounts.

📊

---

Email comes to only one: (240)
240
Joint email address: (46)
46
Something more complex: (26)
26

---

Moving house gave us the opportunity to change all our joint billing accounts. Here's our slightly convoluted setup.

1. We bought a new domain name. As all good projects start.
2. I set up an auto-forward catch-all address. So "anything @example.xyz" is immediately forwarded to my email and my wife's email.
3. We use BitWarden password manager - that lets us share passwords with each other.
4. One of us signs up to a new service as servicename-2019@example.xyz, generates and securely shares a new password, and we both receive the confirmation email.

Why are we doing this?

• One of us could die. It would be extremely annoying to be locked out of an account during a period of bereavement.
• We're jointly responsible for most of these things. It seems silly to split accounts arbitrarily.
• If my phone breaks while we're on holiday, my wife still has a copy of the hotel reservation.
• Neither of us want yet another email account to check.

Reasons not to do this

• If the domain gets hacked / breaks / is blocked or disabled - we'll have lost access to everything.
• We might get divorced. Decoupling things could be harder. Or one of us could lock the other out.
• Surprises and presents are still done on our personal accounts.
• Hard to send from a joint email without setting it up specifically.
• It makes us look like one of those weird old couples who have a joint Facebook account.

What other people do (A.K.A. Market Research)

Caroline Jarrett

@cjforms

Replying to @edent@edent I've answered for me, but my parents only have one email address so they go with 'joint email address'.

---

Carrie Kleiner (Barclay)

@ThisIsCarrie

Replying to @edent@edent Cc or forwarding. But like many others we don’t always share bills-related emails, we just deal with them and mention it if it’s relevant or important.

---

Samathy Barratt

@Samathy_Barratt

Replying to @edent@edent Comes to one address - if its a thing we both need to care about(Travel plans, mostly), the receiver forwards it to the other person.

We don't really consider bills emails to need the attention of both of us. We'd tell each other if an email does.

---

Carol ⭐️

@CarolSaysThings

Replying to @edent@edent Poorly is the unhelpful answer. Most bills/utilities go to my email, but for trips we split the admin. So Thom books the hotel, I do train etc.

Can’t think of how to make it better other than a joint email, as when we’ve given people both addresses, they still always email me.

---

How do you handle this?

Leave a comment in the box. One comment per couple, please :-)