If your email has been widely shared, it's likely already available on the dark web. The real security risk isn't just email exposure and spam—it's the common practice of reusing the same email-password combination across multiple services.

When a single service is breached (like a retailer or streaming platform), threat actors combine your exposed credentials with other leaked data, creating comprehensive profiles. One breach now compromises all accounts sharing those credentials.

Best practice is maintaining dedicated front-facing emails for official business (some sites don't allow alias emails), while using unique email aliases and high-entropy passwords for every other service. Services like SimpleLogin (included with Proton) allow you to easily generate a unique email alias for each individual account.

This compartmentalizes risk—if one service is compromised, others remain secure, and if an alias service fails, your primary email remains functional for critical communications. All of this can be stored in an open-source, independently security audited password manager that is either local on an air-gapped device (one that never connects to the Internet) like KeePass, or that uses cloud sync for greater convenience like Proton Pass/Bitwarden.