DuckDuckGo has built its name on being a privacy-oriented service provider offering services such as a tracker free search engine and a web browser for computers and mobile phones.
To further solidify this, the company has now opened its ‘Email Protection’ service to anyone wishing to get their own ‘@duck.com’ email address. The email protection service was launched last year, however, users had to endure a waitlist before they could try out the service.
The email protection in practice is a forwarding service that is built to remove trackers from emails, therefore, preserving user privacy. Despite the service now being open to everyone, it is still in Beta, but DuckDuckGo seems confident to have collected more information on how it works in order to be confident of welcoming more users.
DuckDuckGo claims on its corporate page that the service detected trackers in 85% of the emails that went through the Email Protection service during the waitlist period. Given that more tech-savvy users typically try out these kinds of services first, there is the possibility that the percentage of emails with trackers goes up now that everyone can sign up.
Once signed up, you can use the @duck.com email address to either receive emails as your primary account or to forward the emails to another email address. In both cases, all the identified trackers will be removed.
To give users more flexibility, you can create as many private email addresses as possible, even one for each platform you sign up to if you wish. Once you have noticed one of your email addresses is getting spammed, you can easily deactivate it through the self-service dashboard.
Such a system of disposable addresses is effective in case a platform such as Plex and Signal recently, gets breached, with attackers getting access to your password and email address, In this case, you would simply deactivate the leaked email address and create a new one minimizing chances of the hackers getting any meaningful information from you.
DuckDuckGo says that any messages passed through the service are not stored by the vendor, while the little account and forwarding information kept for operational reasons is deleted within 30 days after the account’s closure.
To go with the Email Protection release, the company has released a few other services as well;
The first is the expansion of the tracker blocking feature to include links, in addition to scripts, images and other media. This especially targets affiliate marketers and advertisers who track which links are clicked by their target market.
The second feature is a new ‘Smart Encryption’ system that automatically points users who click embedded links to the HTTPS version of the target site, even if the email author used HTTP.
The third and final added feature is the ability to send or reply from @duck.com addresses, which is useful in cases where you do not want the recipient to have your primary email address.
If you wish to try out the service, head over to the Settings page on your DuckDuckGo Privacy browser and scroll down to find Email Protection. For those on desktop, you will need to install the DuckDuckGo extension that is available on all popular browsers including Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Brave to get access to Email Protection
