To get a good email address these days you either have to be very early at jumping on a new email service or you have to be skilled enough to use your own domain.
Not a very sensible idea, given how many sites have "What year where you born?" as one of their security questions.
Anecdata from me: I've never seen this as a security question,
I'm willing to concede that I didn't notice it because I just pick a security question at random and record it in my password database with a made up answer so that I can satisfy their test later on without using a real, guessable answer.
I've mentioned before on here; it did come back to bite me once when I had to ring my insurance company and confirm that my mother's maiden name was... er... "Hitler"!