The secret email account only for password recoveries is a great idea. Same issue cloudflare had back when they were hacked.

I use Google apps for business for email hosting and even setup a secret email account that is used as the admin account (which can setup users and change passwords). I think most people that use google apps set up their primary email address as the admin account, but if that account gets compromised its incredibly easy to reset the password on every account on your domain.