From the perspective of PayPal, it's not that his personal email address is made public. It's that the fact that he has a PayPal account associated with that email address is made public.

It's similar to advice for "forgot password" forms not to acknowledge whether or not an email address or username actually exists--simply tell the user an email was sent for that account regardless.

Fair enough, but it's a reasonable guess that any given primary email address has a paypal account associated with it. It's also not really secret, because you share that information with people to allow them to send you money.

It's probably earnest. An amazingly large number of people think that making your personal e-mail address public is somehow unwise.

I mean, it does slightly increase your rate of spam. I have a private email that I only give out to RL people that has never received a spam message.

Wow I love this idea! Can't believe I haven't thought of it

Having a 'spam email' that you use to sign up for stuff and a separate one for non-automated communication only is definitely a good idea.

If you can keep your email address off the front page of the internet, I figure that will help reduce spam.

At this point, that's like trying to reduce flooding by not dumping a bucket into the river. There's so much spam out there that your only hope is effective filtering.

Oh, I've still got filtering, but it reduces how good/aggressive my filtering has to be.

It is indeed very difficult to keep ALL your email addresses from being publicly listed, so I use GMail accounts for the ones plastered all over the web, and let GMail handle the spam.