My early adopter short gmail address has a similar issue. With password reset by email, it seems like a really bad idea to use it for your bank account, amazon, etc. when I can just reset your password and login.

Also have been using catch-all with [email protected] since 2007 and haven't had any significant problems with spam except for a brief period when a baseball player with the same name was in the news.

Reading this thread makes me feel lucky!

Password reset and cancel those accounts. Those companies aren't doing due diligence with verifying email. You don't want someone else's commercial activity linked to your identity.

I absolutely do this.

The most interesting site I've pw reset and cancelled so far has been my name-sake's dating account on bigblackbeautifulsingles. He had quite a few matches.

The relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1279/

My father has encountered this a fair bit. He was able to get a one of the most prolific incorrect email address users to realize their mistake when they used his email address while purchasing a house in England and he was able to contact the realtor to get back to the person misusing the address and correct the email address.

There's still someone who has emirates frequent flier miles associated with his email address that they can't use (they've forgotten the password to the account and it keeps sending the email to him - but without enough information for him to either respond back or identify the account to have it corrected).

On a similar note, I was also an early Cash App adopter and my username is my firstnamelastinitial (something like JohnS). Increasingly, over the last few years, I've been receiving unsolicited money, almost $800 to date. I used to received much more spam requests.

I ask the senders to "request a refund" but surprisingly, they never do. I guess that's one benefit of having a common username on a service.