When I opened this email account, Gmail was a novelty, so I put up a very generic nickname and used it for non-important stuff, like registering on portals and newsletters.
In a couple of years, gmail became predominant and was used to login to websites, so it actually became my main email address. At that point, I opened another gmail account with my real name.surname for serious business. That said, some of the portals where I registered in 2004 have been took over by spammers, abandoned, or sold their database to third parties. I have tried many times to get my name off from some portals, but they are abandoned. Crawlers have copied and replicated those portals, so my information are on even more websites that I don't know of. So far, nothing bad happened to me, but now that I rely on online work for my livelihood, I would be quite worried in case of identity theft or worse!
Some of my clients are asking for secure way to exchange files, and I have been looking into it but I am not tech savvy enough to find a suitable solution.
When I do get spam, some of them are spoof emails. Some generic usernames are easy to guess, so they must have had bot with that kind of generic emails in their database that they've hacked from sites that didn't have much security on the host they used
