Single or multiple email addresses

For the past 15 years I've been using multiple email addresses to try and separate up my email automatically. I have a main email account, one for developing, another for purchases, and another for mailing lists and so on.

Originally this was to try and keep the email addresses that would be low-priority out of my main inbox. It also helped to keep the spam low by ensuring that I had email addresses that were never publicized anywhere, keeping their content relatively clean.

At the time luxuries like automatic mail filtering were either non-existent or clumsy, and spam filtering was in its infancy because the problem of spam was virtually unheard of.

Today, I'm beginning to regret the decision. Email addresses have become such an identity tool that it becomes difficult for some people to make the link between two email addresses. I've even had people confuse me with somebody else with the same name, just because I used two different email addresses. Meanwhile, email filtering and spam prevention have become so advanced that I rarely have unimportant email clogging my inbox. Actually I rarely use my inbox - all my mail is filtered into the folders I want so I can ignore my email at my leisure.

Moving back to a single email address is non-trivial, and would probably take a year or more, but I wonder if it is wort the effort.