Why dont you use their masked/alternate addresses. That was one of the primary selling points for me. Any questionable site/service gets its own address and is easily removed or filtered if spam starts showing up.
I have those too. But the problem is I migrated away from GMail, where everything worked even with 1 email address, so now I'm stuck with that email address being used by all the people and companies that want to send me email.
(By the way, in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails; this is quite handy, but after migrating to Fastmail this is leaving me with quite a mess in my Inbox, since Fastmail doesn't have this option).
You're not stuck; slowly change addresses with the different companies, people, etc. I did it over the course of a few years without hassle. If you spend $10/year for your own domain, then you can use a catchall, and if you ever decide to leave Fast ail for another provider, you don't have to change all the addreses again.
The fact that it requires slowly changing over years is a sign of getting stuck no?
We can theoretically slowly migrate anything. But when effort > X, we consider it being stuck.
>in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails
It's not quite as elegant, but you can create a rule from an existing email in the mail options. It will try to guess at the best set of filters to match that type of email (and obviously you can refine that manually if needed), so you can send those types of mails to a Marketing folder.
That only works with something you actually signed up for. When your email gets leaked in a database and sold a thousand times you just start getting spam for all types of things.
My solution was to start over with a new "root" email address and then keep it private. Having unique email addresses for each service (which then forwards to the "root" email address) is a bit of a pain but it does work for spam and, depending on what else you share with the service, privacy as well.
For better or worse if you want to reliably control who you receive email from you need to control who knows your email addresses and have the ability to disable/filter them.
the same is true for SMS/call spam - my phone number is a single digit off from my wife's, she gets 6-10 total spam messages and calls a day, i get one a year. It's because she uses her cellphone number to sign up for fuel rewards and stuff, and they immediately sell it. I use my voip number to sign up for anything, and i have notifications shut off for SMS - and a phone tree for calls. Spam calls never get through a phone tree/IVR.
