I have been doing this for well over 10 years and can confirm the approach, with one small tweaks:
The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless).
Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc).
This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)
> Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service
I tried this and don’t recommend it.
Yeah, you get the advantage of knowing who leaked your address. But I don’t care. If the ‘spam and lists’ address gets too spammy, I’ll just create another.
The disadvantage is that you have to configure a mail client to send from this address if you ever want to do that, and I found myself doing it far more often than I imagined. Need to write back to a store regarding a transaction? Frequently enough. To my health insurance company for some reason? Of course.
No, the idea is to remove as much friction as possible. This adds friction. Keep it simple.
There are services designed to allow you to think up new email addresses on the fly, with no setup, and still have them delivered. I personally like https://www.spamgourmet.com/ - you can create an identifying address on the fly that also limits the total number of emails you'll receive from that address. It solves all the issues you mentioned - it's frictionless and still allows replies, while preventing spam. The gmail '+' feature works too, but is so high profile that a lot of spammers know how to parse it.
You can also use the + for email adress, my.name+facebook@domain.com. No need to register another mail adress for each service. It can lead to problems logging in though, not everyone knows that + is a legal character in mail adresses.
Panix.com has a feature that sidesteps that problem. It accepts any email address that looks like: hackernews@myname.users.panix.com, where you can customize "hackernews" to be a mailing list, company, or any text; and "myname" is your actual email address, eg myname@panix.com. No charge. Works great. Easily filtered.
I had enough validation and dictation issues with that approach that I registered a catchall email on a subdomain, so I give out yoursitename@email.example.com. For one thing, anyone wise to that trick will just strip
The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless).
Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc).
This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)