[jjav]

> (Why do I get so much spam? Because I've been using the same email address, never hiding it at all even on Usenet, for 25 years.)

I've had my same email for about as long as you (maybe 1-2 years more), never hiding it at all including Usenet.

> I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering.

gmail spam filtering isn't very good. Lots of false positives which is far worse than the occasional false negative. I have a gmail-hosted account for work and it's very annoying.

I host my own email infrastructure and spam isn't a problem. With a bayesian filter trained on my content, I rarely see any spam. Maybe like 1-2 per month? I don't keep track, it's very rare. And no false positives ever.