I've used Gmail for years and have never had a problem with spam, they always get filtered to the spamfolder. Having had this address for so long I've thought about creating a new account, the way I would do this is to forward all of the email coming into my old email to my new one, assuming the spamfilter works, the spam won't be forwarded to your new address. This way, you won't have to give out a new address to everyone and you can use your old email when websites requires your email for registration for example. For registrations requiring an email on websites you don't trust or won't access again, just use a junk email, you can find several alternatives with a quick search on google.

For my "proper" email I use posteo.de (1 EUR/month), where I've set up a few aliases so that I don't have to disclose my "official" email address when registering for stuff of lesser importance. If an alias gets compromised by spammers (haven't happened yet, touch wood), I can just delete it and set up another one.
For mailing lists and a few newsletters I used to use gmail (which the spammers eventually got to), now I use yandex.ru (russian equivalent of the google overlords). Which also allows pop/smtp/imap. If it starts to receive spam, I'll probably migrate it to posteo.
And, for pure throw-away-registrations and such, I use dispostable.com, since I seem to have forgotten my old hotmail password.

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I use my own mail server, VPS are cheap nowadays, you have full control and creating/removing temporary mail addresses to use for spam prone services is as easy as it could be. I don't even have a spam filter set up, simply not necessary for the very small amount of spam I get.

Thats why you own your own domain, you can then make as mail alias as you want. You can make one for each place you put it in if needed. I usually keep one for forums and such, one for bank accounts, one for friends and family, etc. The bank account one is an alias for my wife and myself both so we both get notices there.

Just FYI in case you are pondering a move to another provider.

Check your SPAM folder if you are using your gmail address to order stuff online.

This week Google changed their policies on email and I found several commercial newsletters in my SPAM folder, of senders whose emails I have been receiving for years (subscribed even) and neverf moved to the SPAM folder manually.
And this morning I had to call an online shop to ask why they did not send me an email with postal tracking code after shipping the product I ordered from them. They found a Gmail bounce of their email to me in their mail. I had them re-send the tracking code to another mail domain...

I could not find an official notification from Google that something changed, but the web shop owner told me he saw several other bounces for @gmail.com addresses, since the start of this week.

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Well, after seeing how many services are associated on my Gmail account I gaved up on migrating, it'd take a lot of time. I cleaned my inbox (+4000 emails removed) and I will try to setup filters to prevent the spam. On my look for alternatives (apart from the ones posted on this thread) I've found Hushmail and Shazzlemail. Hushmail is paid but they offer a free account (only 25MB inbox but still free) but I couldn't set it up on my mobile devices (no app has support for it and I couldn't connect to their IMAP service). I could setup Shazzlemail but I couldn't receive an email on it (tried to send from my Gmail account and it didn't arrived). And Shazzlemail works a little bit different than the "normal" email account and it could be a little annoying to use.

I find that the biggest problem when using an alternative email service to gmail is the spam filtering. That was until I used Thexyz Webmail which has the best spam filtering I have used so far. I can honestly say that I do not get any spam now. May be one or two a week at most but then I can easily block them with a simple click of a button.

I use openmailbox.org I'm quite happy with it.

I use hushmail premium.
Lately I'm considering a move also due to their published Privacy policy and their apparent violation of the published policy.[1]
"If we receive an order enforceable under the laws of British Columbia, Canada" vs "a court order obtained through a mutual assistance treaty between the U.S. and Canada" Today, it's steroid merchants, tomorrow it's any "enemy" of the NSA. f-that.

But their whitelist feature is a winner and it's hard to find an alternate that has this same feature.
I can safely publish my main hush.ai account without seeing any spam, or just use an alias such as fake-a-roonie@nym.hush.com

I'll never see anything not on my "allow mail from" list.

Perhaps its time to take an audit of services associated. How many of those services do you really need? How many can you/do you have time to read the e-mails. I try to go through annually (usually during the winter months when its too cold to get outside) and clean up subscriptions that I haven't used in a while.

Try http://www.mail.com, easy to remember, and works fine.

It is not a subscription problem, it is more like forum accounts, services associated with my gmail account (the login with Google feature that a lot of services/apps offers) and buying things online.

@scriptdorks, Thexyz seems to be an interesting option, thanks.

@Knightron Wow, openmailbox seems to be really interesting too, gonna give it a try.

I used to have Gmail as a second account, just for all those annoying sites you have to sign up to. I have since switched to Yandex.ru. It's quite possible that Yandex are just as bad as Google for spying and whatever else, but the difference is they don't pretend to be any better. Google do. They pretend to abide by their motto. We all know they don't. They are an information clearing-house for the NSA and MI5. I refuse to use Google search or any of its desktop or online products. I also refuse to configure or install them on any computer I maintain.

I function under the assumption that all of my e-mail and Internet travels are monitored by Big Brother. Snowden states that everything is monitored. We live in a brave new, albeit frightening world.

Some advices I use to give to my friends (but they ignore me ).

Buy a domain, contract some cheap web hosting. It's not so expensive to have your own site and your own email accounts.

If you have not time to learn html, use seamonkey composer.

No facebooring, no linketontin no stupid blogs, no tweetin shit, put in your web site what you want to share.

If you're of those that have a machine 24/7 you can pay instead to your ISP for a static IP to run your own http and mail server at home with Slackware (the only way to be sure no one cat read your mail). Then you get a free CA here:

https://www.startssl.com/

to associate to sendmail to avoid your emails go to SPAM ;-). You can associate a certificate to apache to run https site.

And use this free dns server:

http://freedns.afraid.org/

If you use a external server get used to download and archive the messages you want to preserve and remove the rest from the server. Anyone with root access can read your emails; google isn't free, it tracks your data for market statistics. Take care where you put your email address on internet if you want to avoid spam. In a blog or a site use a image with the email address written on it to avoid it get tracked by bots.

To avoid using too much disk save the files attached in your home (i.e. pictures) and remove attachments from your archived mail. Your plain text email will pass to occupy megabytes instead of gigabytes Having a server to send files you can upload to a folder and just to add a link in your emails. You can send your file to 100 recipients just adding links in your message, plain text.