Some services will use that as the username, others allow me to pick my own. Using a password manager helps this whole scheme. Now that I do that, I could go to random email addresses and usernames.
The only way around this, I think, is to only have uncommon emails, like instead of [email protected], use [email protected]. Put a block on the common ones and you're good to go.
Once i figured this out i just created wildcard aliases that end with a static prefix: [email protected], [email protected], etc. This cuts down on 99% of the random spam.
Spammers effectively killed that RFC.
And if you use the same email for everything (as is the alternative), attackers can attempt to try that against popular sites. So I don't see the downside of this method?
I actually don't like the idea of using email addresses as user IDs. I believe that was a lazy approach in the first place and this causes too many problems. I'm sure it all started that way because someone wanted your contact info, and since the only way to guarantee a valid email was to make you verify it. It has nothing to do with security.
Nobody said security was easy or convenient.
Anyway, to each his own. I have my own domains and do, unfortunately, have about 100 email addresses/aliases. Yeah, it can be inconvenient to maintain. I originally started using the aliases because I wanted to know who was giving out my email to spammers. I caught a few and stopped doing business with them.
In a mass compromise like the Adobe one, it's highly unlikely that the hackers are going to go out of their way to attack people who use this method when there's millions of much easier targets already in their list.
Using this approach also makes it a lot easier to spot spam - if I get an email to "[email protected]" claiming to be from my bank, it's highly unlikely to be genuine. If it's coming to "[email protected]", there's at least a fair chance that it's real - I still treat it with a fair amount of caution, but as I've filtered out the obvious junk I can spend more time checking out these reasonably genuine-lookuing one. Using a random email like [email protected] would make this quick filtering a lot harder.
I go through the trouble of creating a new email each time. I've considered writing a script to make it easier, but my current mail provider makes that difficult.
FYI, I used to do this too. And this is how (in a similar fashion) Mat Honan got Gizmodo's Twitter and his iCloud and Gmail accounts hacked and also had his computer remotely wiped because he used his name in every domain/service as his account name or email account name.
Edited for more information.