I've had an Apple email account since .mac, and a Gmail account since it was beta, and invitation only. Both are firstnamelastinitial@... If I had to do it over, I'd reconsider that format, but it's a remnant from when AOL assigned me "firstnamelastinitial2" and I somehow never got over the fact that I wasn't first, and got the "2" LOL.
The Apple account has been surprisingly reliable, and while the spam filter suffered early on, it has been very good for years.
While Gmail's filter is also very good, I get more false positives from it than Apple's filters.
Gmail ignores periods within the address*, so they have no effect on its addresses. Aliases can be formed by appending a "+ ....."
Spammers are pretty clever, so they can reach pretty much every address format. However, I've found one of the downsides of having a name-based (and not nickname or other phrase) address are the numbskulls who don't know how to enter their own email addresses, and as a result, I've gotten all sorts of legitimate mail misdirected to my Gmail account. Receipts, reservations, etc. But also subscriptions and company lists I didn't sign up for...those are infuriating, especially for some brain dead companies that have no unsubscribe options and tell you to call them (Hello, JCPenney) to be removed from their lists! I just mark them as spam, or filter them out if they persist.
* IIRC, this wasn't always the case, which I suspect may contribute to the problem above. While I clearly own the address, and receive all its mail, with no foreign user activity logged, some theorize that at some point Gmail may have allowed creation of "duplicate" addresses with periods. Something within Google's system can misdirect mail, and others have also experienced it, but with no firm conclusion as to its cause.
I also have a Yahoo account, and know of people, and organizations that have used Yahoo's personal and small business mail services, respectively, to host their email. Both types have fallen victim to the address book spoofing/spamming incidents more than once. I wouldn't trust Yahoo as anything other than a sacrificial junk account.
I really dislike Outlook's webmail interface, but the service is fine.
