Circa 1997 a coworker lamented that he had signed up for some email list, and attempts to unsubscribe weren’t working (more of a manual thing, IIRC). I made the suggestion to set up a cronjob to run hourly, to send an email request to be unsubscribed. It would source a text file containing the request to be unsubscribed. And with each iteration, it would duplicate the text from the file, effectively a geometric progression. The list owner responded about a week or so later, rather urgently requesting that my coworker cut it out, saying that he would remove him from the list. Apparently the list owner had been away on vacation the entire time.
I’m in a similar situation and hadn’t thought of it that way. My take on the email I receive is that they fall into one of these categories: a) genuinely intended for me (and not spam), b) spam, c) genuinely intended case of mistaken address (they forgot to include another character), d) someone using mine as their throwaway (site sending verification email), and e) someone using mine as their throwaway (no verification process, ergo not altogether different from spam).