I usually give a different email address to each service that I sign up to, so I can tell if they are selling my address, but I never thought of giving a different mother's maiden name so I can detect phishing. It's a reasonable strategy, but I have trouble remembering the name of my elementary school, my favorite color (I dont care), the make of my first car (my parent's or the one I actually paid for) ... However, I will trythe strategy of giving a couple of wrong answers to weed out the fakes.
The issue with providing an answer that is a meaningful response is that one can in fact guess and often get it right. Second, most sites that use these secret answers (favorite color, first car, ...) don't have a mechanism to lock out after a certain number of incorrect attempts.
This is a really good idea. You could have all the emails forward to one master account, and then when one started forwarding spam, you could cut it off.
