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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

So the next race is going to be pinging all these cookies to keep them alive

Nah. The adtech people are already talking about persistent identification mechanisms to allow the same identification in the absence of third party cookies.

If you're privacy-minded, it's worth keeping an eye on these efforts, as some of them involve getting publishers to require a login and an email address or phone number from their users, then using that as the persistent identifier.

If that idea takes root, then we'll probably want to cancel accounts and avoid making new ones.

Or a sign-in with Apple-like system so tracking is limited to each site.

Best decision I have made so far is setting up a catch-all polic for my domain. any_random_address@mydomain.com is saved in a "dummy" inbox, I check it from time to time and give different emails for different services to identify who sold my email.

instagram is insta@mydomain.com, netflix is nflx@mydomain.com etc.

If someone needs pointers: I use webfaction for MX, setup mailboxes with catch-all policy and setup a rule to forward these email to my gmail and have a filter on gmail to skip inbox and save in "dummy" category.

p.s. if someone has a better alternative to webfaction for email only stuff, please let me know, not sure if I can do it with an other provider that is cheaper.

I use fastmail, and there is no additional setup needed. Just point the catchall at an account and use the filters to sort as appropriate. Mail from my legacy gmail, yahoo, and hotmail accounts get forwarded to respective aliases at mydomain.com and sorted into appropriate folders as well.

Best online hygiene decision I have ever made. Ranks up there with installing ubock origin on desktop/mobile.

I use hcoop.net and the wildcard address is one line in a configuration file. I do a little bit of filtering with a sieve filter.

I've used migadu.com for well over a year now and been very happy with them. They let you setup multiple regex based catchalls, so I can create any address prefixed with shop and have it forwarded to one address, while ones prefixed with game get forwarded to another. If you aren't planning on sending any emails from the domain, their free single domain plan might work very well for you.

Occasionally I have to send emails especially when I have to respond to a customer care response. But will take a look, I am willing to pay for this(I am already paying for webfaction).

That's grand until someone runs a dictionary spamming attack on your domain. One of the interesting complexities here is if you forward to gmail from a domain, and there's too much spam, it'll blacklist your mail forwarder as a spammer.

(n.b., I've done something like this for ~nearly 20~ 23 years, and I've scaled back to prefix+tag with some aggressive blocking of email addresses that have been leaked/sold)

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