Awfully strange serafina, thankfully I don't receive any, since the gmail is my main work email for my photography I don't use it to register with potentially nefarious sites, I just use a spare email account to register, test it for up to a year, if it's ok, then I change it if no spam comes to my email
Not saying it's your fault in anyway, just that we don't know what some sites do with the email information
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.