One of the biggest problems I faced with my old gmail account was that because I used it for everything, eventually everything was sending me emails. As it came from what looks like legitimate sources, gmail had a huge challenge sorting out the good from the bad. It did a great job, but eventually I had to consider that email compromised.
Initially I planned to setup my own mail server for my own domain and aggressively manage the spam, but the last time I did that was in 2000, and I was rustier than a garden gate. The amount of relearning and work I would have to do to set it up properly and securely was going to be more than I could handle. However, I stumbled upon a solution which works well for me:
I registered a domain, and let GOOGLE manage it for me. The only thing different to me is that my 'google' email uses my domain name. As it's my last name, I get the convient forms of Firstname@lastname.com for my personal email. But how does this solve the spam problem if google isn't already solving it for you? On it's own it doesn't, but I decided to take what works with google and add some quirks (and let's face it, google knows a lot more about hosting email servers than I do).
1. Use a non traditional extension. No .COM, .NET, .ORG. Spammers can catch 90% of all email addresses by bulk spamming incremental names. *@gmail.com is going to get spam no matter what, but *@obscuredomain.it is not likely worth the computational effort, even for a botnet.
2. Do NOT give out your primary email address. If you want to give ABCBusiness your email address, give them the address ABCBusiness@yourdomain.com. There is nothing to setup other than having unassigned email addresses redirect to a single mailbox. What does this do? Well, let's say you start getting spam. Take a look at the 'TO:' field and if it says plumberbob@yourdomain.com then you know it was Plumber Bob that was patient zero for your spam problem. Simply blacklist incoming mail sent to the plumberbob@yourdomain.com email address and your spam is GONE. Give a new email to Plumber Bob and tell him to be more careful with this one.
I've been using this system for over a year and there have been a total of 10-20 spam messages that google caught and sent directly to my spamfolder, and one annoying company that kept sending me advertisements until I blacklisted the email 'thenoisycompany@mydomain.com'. There was also a period of time when a bunch of spam messages came through a to address from the person I assume was the previous owner of the domain. Blaclisted that address and all was quiet again.
The basic premise is that I realized that my email address will eventually get compromised, but at least this way I can compartmentalize the damage.