Since Gmail doesn’t block them anymore, do you have any strategy for me to stop them or should I just abandon the address I’ve had for 15 years?
The problem is, everyone knows about the myrealemail+someentropything@gmail.com trick now, and many spammers will just chop off anything after the `+`. This way, they literally can ONLY use the email you give them and they never have knowledge of your real email. You can even set it up so you can respond with that custom email.
Best of all, it's free. I've used it for years and I've caught a good few companies that have sold my email address without my consent, and this is the way they get caught because I can know for sure they sold it because I gave them a custom email that's only ever been given to them and yet I get a campaign email addressed to that email through my normal gmail.
There are enough stories on here of people waking up to find they've lost access to Gmail or other services that I see this as a credible scenario.
My vanity domain for mail and Oracle CI NextCloud allow me to use their services without fear.
I've recently set up Amazon SES so I can send emails from <companyname>@vanity.domain instead of replies coming from Gmail.
At the first sign of being locked out I can switch my forwarding to another provider and carry on as usual. Self hosting isn't even out of the question if it comes to it.
it's funny, because within 10 minutes of me writing the above I got an email from a recruiter that was addressed to netflix@<mydomain>.com. This is absolute proof that netflix sold my email to a recruiting agency (I had applied to them a while back, but they didn't have an opening on the team I was interested in). Shameful stuff..
I did this with a few gmail accounts that I created for vendors that would not permit custom domains, one of a cell company and two for a couple social media sites that did not like custom domains.
To save the existing contents of your gmail account, go into account settings and enable IMAPS access. Use an IMAP client to pull down the emails. You can use IMAP to push them up to your new provider should you wish to keep emails on a server.