Drowning in Email Addresses

I have a lot of different email addresses. In Thunderbird I have 23 separate accounts listed. Most aren't used, many now forward into other accounts and I'm slowly bringing them together, although I still have the issue of a work account too. This means people often get confused when mailing me.

Many of my accounts now either forward straight into my Gmail account, or go into it and are forwarded on because I've found Gmail's spam filtering to be superb and it cuts out 99% of my spam. Plus, I get copies of everything stored online, a large amount of storage and a nice front-end (better than the ugly Squirrel Mail on most CPanel hosts) so I can log in to check/send emails wherever I have a net connection.

I don't like checking my personal mail at work. Some things just can't wait though and I need the time to react, so select mails and those from a few people, get forwarded to work so I am informed immediately and can react in a timely fashion. I do this because a) I don't want to give out my work address to everyone, b) it keeps the address they send to more consistent and c) because not everyone pays attention to the address they are sending to and thinks "hang on, it's work time, better send to his work address."

Part of the reason I keep separate email addresses is to keep certain tasks away from each other. Obviously people expect me to respond from the List Books email address when contacting me about books, for example, but more and more I find it much easier to just deal with one or two accounts rather than dozens. Do other people have more than one address, do they suffer from multiple accounts? I don't know.