Here’s why that’s a bad idea.

 • You’ve set up accounts with an email address you don’t control. If you leave the City, you will have trouble recovering personal accounts without it.
 • The upcoming holiday period is a time that we all need to remain extra vigilant when it comes to email phishing. City email addresses are more commonly shared via the web, so it’s easier to end up on various spam email lists. Once you start mixing work and personal email, you might be more easily fooled by that fake shipping confirmation, for example.

And of course it is a cost to the City for the technology to send, receive, and store your email. We already receive nearly 15 million emails from the Internet per year and don’t need any more than necessary.

What to do:
 • Change the email account on your personal online accounts to a personal email address.
 • Subscribe to email lists using a personal email address. If you’re already getting them on your City account, change it if you can. If you can’t, unsubscribe and re-subscribe using your personal email address.
 • If you get junk mail that you didn’t sign up for, don’t bother trying to unsubscribe. Just delete it. Often, spammers use that technique to identify which email addresses are real.
 • If you don’t have a personal email account, there are plenty of sites where you can get one at no cost, including Gmail, YMail, and Hotmail.