DuckDuckGo Opens Email Protection Beta to Everyone

DuckDuckGo announced that its Email Protection service, while still in beta, is now available to everyone. Previously, there was a waitlist.

“We’ve removed the waitlist for DuckDuckGo Email Protection, making the beta open for everyone to try,” DuckDuckGo’s Omid Majdi writes. “We’ve also added new features like Link Tracking Protection that helps prevent tracking in email links, Smarter Encryption that helps with unencrypted email links, and the ability to reply directly from your Duck Addresses.”

DuckDuckGo Email Protection is a free email forwarding service that removes multiple types of hidden email trackers and lets you create unlimited unique private email addresses on the fly, all without switching email providers or apps, the company explains. These email trackers are used to collect information about you and build a profile, and in testing this service, DuckDuckGo discovered that about 85 percent of email messages contain hidden trackers.

Using Email Protection requires you to be in the DuckDuckGo ecosystem, so to speak. That is, you can sign-up for the service only using DuckDuckGo products: either the DuckDuckGo mobile app on Android or iPhone, the DuckDuckGo web browser beta on Mac, or a desktop web browser that uses the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension. In the latter two cases, you can sign up for Email Protection by navigating to duckduckgo.com/email.

There, you will create an @duck.com email address and associate it with an existing email address. Then, any email sent to the new address will be forwarded to your existing address with the email trackers removed and you can access them normally. Email Protection also supports private email address generation so you can use an anonymized email account on sites you don’t trust.

If you’re interested in this service, it’s worth checking out the original post, which has a lot more detail.