I have my main email in the whois records for my website and I haven't noticed any increase of spam before and after. Perhaps the level of spam is proportionate to the popularity/traffic of your site?
Hm, it certainly doesn't have to do with popularity. My domain has a single visitor and he looks suspiciously like me. I use it as a test server for all kinds of general software vandalism. It does get visits from bots though, perhaps my registrar has "helped" me by registering it at search services. Pretty certain that I am linked nowhere.
I noticed that too: bot traffic even though (at that time) my site was linked or mentioned nowhere on the www. I guess the search companies crawl the WHOIS records for new domain names and send their bots over, even if your site is nothing but a blank placeholder page. :-)
You are lucky. Years ago, I made a mistake of buying domain on GoDaddy and my inbox was full of spam everyday. There was lot of questionable spam and I ended up deleting the email address.
I bought a domain on GoDaddy a while back and the very next day I started getting robocalls and spam emails when I had been getting basically none before. They hold your personal info hostage; either pay extra or we expose this info to a legion of scrapers.
