What's the difference between a Virtual Email Address and a regular email address?
In a word: storage.
A Virtual Email Address never really stores your email anywhere- it just forwards it to another address/account which handles storing it for you. A traditional email account has storage (aka "An Inbox") associated with it. The mail is received there and stored waiting to be opened. Note that a traditional email account may also do it's own forwarding but with additional processing and/or configuration.
Which one should you use? In most cases a Virtual Email with forwarding is most desirable but there are pros and cons to each. It all depends on whether you prefer keeping accounts separate or having mail for different accounts show up in one place. We all have personal address books with home phone numbers, work numbers, mobile numbers, fax numbers, weekend numbers, ugh! The same can be said for email addresses these days but the nice part about a Virtual Email Address is it doesn't require maintaining or checking a separate account- everything just shows up in once place. How convenient.
One caveat when using a Virtual Email Address is that replying to an email may instead use the email address of the account to which it was forwarded. Most free email services (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) have means to have multiple "Reply-To" accounts that can be selected when sending/replying-to emails.
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