You'd be surprised. There is a Texas law firm whose domain is my domain name + "law". Guess who receives a significant portion of their "confidential" messages and inquiries?

totally agree. but it is also sooo convienient as a junk mail address for signups.

Just like biometrics aren't a password but are a good user ID, I have a couple different email address that I use for very different purposes that involve different exposure. My work email never has anything not work related, my personal email rarely gets ads and I prune it aggressively...my gmail looks like a syphilitic brain and I don't mind because I know what it is.

I do that in a fine-grained way with my personal domain: I receive mail addressed to any user at the domain. I never give out the same address twice. I can filter mail based on the "To" field, and always know how senders ultimately got my address. It works out because spammers never send mail to random other users at the same domain; I think trying unconfirmed users would be a quick way to get themselves blocked by common spam filters.

A fun thing I found this way: Samsung won't let you sign up for an account if the string "samsung" appears in your email address. Must be annoying for [email protected]!

I have a dedicated, very generic sounding domain name just for signups.

I use a custom email for each service. Like [email protected] for Amazon, xyz.ycombinator@... and so on.

All email is forwarded to a single catch-all account from a good provider, so it is just as convenient to use.

But it is trivial to isolate what emails came from which service, who has leaked my email to spammers, to just block a individual recipient, ... . It also makes it easy to have multiple accounts without the annoyance of a fallback email.

I wish I had switched to this method much earlier.

Ideally that domain would be used by at least a few hundred people to prevent associating via domain name though, with different prefixes (see xyz above) for each user.

For over a decade I've used hushmail's aliasing feature which allows you to create such custom emails (e.g. [email protected]) on the fly almost instantaneously. I use one per service that requires an email to sign up. Works great.

You can do it with the free account, too.

Just delete one if you are obviously getting spam because of a service selling their email lists. Which is a reality for "free" services. Bonus points because you can identify exactly who it is that is doing this and have the option of publicly shaming them.

I do this too and it’s great except for services that use the reply-to/from as a requirement for service emails.

Not really. I have started moving my emails from Gmail to my last name based domain and have already received a few emails meant for others - and this is a domain that I've had for many years.