This looks like it might be your personal email. Consider protecting yourself by making a temporary email for the purposes of your research such as [email protected].

I appreciate the caution, thank you. That email is what gets funneled from my website, so it's fine. It's not my personal personal email. It's for the book.

Or better, consider protecting those offering their experiences as well by using an encrypted email provider like protonmail, or offering a GPG key.

I don't know what those are, I'm sorry. I'm not in the industry (software engineering/tech) so am not familiar with those (though I know they exist). Is it something I can do in the next hour?

I'd suggest going through https://www.privacytools.io/#email. These providers won't give your data to NSA or third party companies(or at least this is more likely, than with another provider like google). Given you are asking for some sensitive data, I'd suggest you use one of these, at least for this specific project if you can't make the move completely.

A good tool for every journalist to have in their tool chest: https://keybase.io

Journalists tend to want people to be able to contact them. The spam etc. is just the cost of doing business.

completely true.

Now you and Google will know!

Consider using a mail provider that is not in the business of selling personal information.