[zaphoyd]

My wife and I have used a unique address for every company/service for 15 years or so (both online and physical stores).

We’ve gotten less spam than I expected and from fewer sources.

The big ones are dropbox (likely breach related), justworks, [email addresses listed in Whois records - note: Whois privacy features are absolutely worth it], and emails associated with open source projects and businesses that get listed in repos/project/business websites.

I have blacklisted 1 video game discussion forum whose owners sold it and all its data and 4-5 misc retailers (mostly in fashion/clothing) for either outright spam or having non-functional un-subscription features.

We continue to use this email strategy for a variety of reasons, not only spam management. I don’t think I would set such a system up if my only goal was spam reduction as breaches and publicly posted addresses account for the vast majority of the spam and those will get you either way. There is merit to having your main personal address be separate from the ones you publically post for business/open source purposes.

As an aside: the experience has led me to an anti-spam idea that I wonder if anyone has tried on a larger scale. I have multiple different addresses that were clearly involved in a breach or I post on public websites where they get scraped. However, I know that both addresses are unrelated to each other so I end up getting listed on some spam lists multiple times. In these cases, any message where you get separate copies to multiple different addresses is spam 100% of the time.

[usrusr]

Same observation, similar timeframe. A few that have likely been breaches, one or two failed web game businesses sold for scrap.

My motivation of keeping it up is mostly habit, I wouldn't want shop mails on one of my public addresses anyways. A nice benefit is that phishing mails arriving at the wrong address are even easier to not fall for (but a deeper phishing attempt, with targeting based on a breach or something like that might become easier to fall for)

[koolba]

> However, I know that both addresses are unrelated to each other so I end up getting listed on some spam lists multiple times. In these cases, any message where you get separate copies to multiple different addresses is spam 100% of the time.

I think you just described a bloom filter.

[nickm12]

Same experience over a little bit more than a decade. Essentially none of the custom email addresses I use have started getting spam. The two cases where I did get a lot of unwanted email was when I was buying a car and looking for a mortgage. However, when I unsubscribed from the emails that was respected. Biggest source of spam in those ten years was for my personal email address, which clearly was leaked from some family member's address book—on multiple instances my address was spammed along with other people in the same social circle.

[Litost]

I also use unique email addresses per service and most of my spam seems to originate from breaches or websites that have since died. My ISP also uses SpamAssassin so at lot of it gets filtered before it gets to me, so the amount I get isn't in any way overwhelming, esp. given the amount of places I've signed up to.