You need at least 1,000 email addresses

Let me count the ways

#1: One real address is for known business relationships and trusted, clued friends and family. For clueless friends and family, use #2. This real address is for you. It's your professional address if you are a small business owner. It is not info@ or contact@ or any other role account. It is your name or some readable and recognizable variation of it. It can be first name only like fred@flintstones.com or the more formal fred.flintstone@test.com. Capitalization helps make it more readable such as FredFlintstone@heh.com. You do not use this address to inquire about dance lessons or sign up for the NY Times site. You'll use #3 for this.

#2: One or more generic address such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. or even a paid account at something like http://Fastmail.fm. Paying will get you better filtering, more options and less ads. Gmail is probably the best free option around today.

#3: A method for easily creating "throwaway" emails. One such service is http://trashmail.net which is fine. I choose to use http://sneakemail.com which costs about $3 per month but has a lot of flexibility. Sneakemail lets you make up addresses as you go. For example, a newspaper site asks for an email. You give them your made up one from Sneakemail or the one from Trashmail.net which you set to expire in one week. Since both Sneakemail and Trashmail allow creation of addresses on the fly, you can actually have thousands (hence the title). I've certainly created several hundred.

If you keep control over your email by making sure you wait until you know the level of trust of your correspondents before revealing your true email (#1), you will lead a peaceful, happy and prosperous life, at least where email is concerned.