The DuckDuckGo service is not a regular email service like Gmail or Outlook. However, its Email Protection is now available to all users after a year of beta testing. It promises to keep trackers away from your emails.
The email service from DuckDuckGo was just released, and it promises to get rid of spam from your inbox. Instead, it is a forwarding service. DuckDuckGo finds the trackers (or trackers) in the mail and gets rid of them before sending a clean copy of the message to an address you choose.
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How does the website work?
To do this, Email Protection lets you choose a @duck.com address when you set up your account. After choosing Duck mail, you will need to enter the address of another email service where you want your emails to be sent without trackers. DuckDuckGo will look at each email to see if it has any registered trackers on its blacklist, and if it does, they will be taken off.
On top of that, websites you don’t trust are given their own private addresses. In this case, DuckDuckGo automatically finds the email fields and gives you the option to make a private email address that gives you more security. The mail will be sent to the tray you choose, and companies won’t be able to track you. You can turn these addresses off at any time.
DuckDuckGo also has protection against link tracking, which stops companies from following you after you click on a link in an email. With the smart encryption used by the search engine, the service will also change HTTP links that are not secure to HTTPS links.
Last but not least, DuckDuckGo lets you reply from your inbox using any @duck.com address you want. To do this, just click “Reply,” and the message will come from your @duck address instead of your regular email address.
DuckDuckGo Email protection is reliable, but not 100% effective
Email Protection was announced more than a year ago, and when it was in beta, it was able to get rid of up to 85% of trackers from the emails of participants. DuckDuckGo says that there will be times when you won’t be able to stop trackers.
“We want to stop as many hidden trackers as we can. There are always new trackers, and blocking some of them can make the site less useful. We can’t stop all of them, but we’re always working to make this email tracking block bigger.”
Also, remember that the “Reply” button could hide your original email address. DuckDuck Go doesn’t create the message itself. Yet, It can’t guarantee that the email won’t include a forwarding address or other identifying information.
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If you want to try the service, all you have to do is add the browser extension and create your @duck address on the site for it. Email protection is also available on the iOS, Android, and Mac browsers for DuckDuckGo.
Can DuckDuckGo save emails?
Since it’s a forwarding service, some people worry about their privacy. DuckDuckGo says that it doesn’t care what’s in your emails. Also, if you use Email Protection, it won’t store your messages.
“Not necessary! When we get an email, we remove the trackers right away and send it on to you. We never keep it in our systems. We don’t even save headers.”
The Terms of Service tell you more about how Email Protection works. The company says that the process of getting rid of trackers and sending them to the user happens in memory and is never written to a disk. DuckDuckGo will only know the addresses you make and the email address to which you will forward the messages.
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