As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about these things both personally and professionally, I can make two strong recommendations to check out:
- Get your own domain name. It's cheap, like $8 a year now. When you use all those services listed above (including like 33mail.com) - more and more services are blocking those domains
- With whomever you register your new domain name (yourname.net or whatever), set it to forward all ("catchall") email to that domain to your Gmail account.
- Name every single account you use with a different username in the email, so this site might be "
[email protected]". You don't need to pre-set your name.
Anything that has "yourdomain.net" at the end will come into your Gmail box, you don't need to pre-define it. Now you can run filters on it, sort it, etc. In gmail the To: line will say the "
[email protected]" address so it's easy to search. If you start getting spam, you can see based on the to: line in your Gmail the name of the service selling you out. If I get a ton of strange vacation offers and the to: line says "
[email protected]", I know who sold me out. The only catch is that if you reply to the message, it comes from your personal (gmail or whatever) email address. I had one retail customer service refuse to do something I asked because the request didn't come from the email address they have on file.
If you want to take it to the next level of coolness, I subscribe to
https://simplelogin.io/ - this service allows you to point your domain name to them and they in turn forward it to your personal email address. If you reply to an incoming message, it goes via their outbound server, and it looks to the recipient that your message came from "
[email protected]" even though it came from your gmail account. They essentially keep a list of matching email aliases. I've been using it for a year now, and it's been flawless, I have about 10 different work/fun domains hosted on them.