The e-mail service of the privacy-friendly search engine DuckDuckGo is now generally available. The service protects you against tracking and makes disposable addresses easy, among other things.
Email Protection, as the service is called, is not a classic mailing service but a kind of filter or layer for your real inbox. First, you create an @duck.com email address. Then, everything that comes there is filtered from trackers and immediately forwarded to your regular email address. Users also get to see how many and which trackers were stopped.
With your Duck address, you can also easily create an unlimited number of disposable addresses that are immediately linked to your regular mailbox. But if you wish, you can also reply from your Duck address or compose an e-mail, in other words, e-mail anonymously. Other features like Smart Encryption change links from HTTP to HTTPS.
DuckDuckGo also emphasizes that it will never reveal the email address behind the Duck address unless it is legally required to do so and has no other option. It also says that e-mails are stripped of trackers in memory, and messages are therefore not stored on its servers. Even if your account is deleted, it guarantees that all data will be deleted within thirty days.
The email service has been in closed beta for a little over a year, since July 2021. Even today, that beta status remains, but the service is available to anyone who wants it. All you need to do is install the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials browser extension for Firefox or Chrome and register for the service at Duckduck go/email. This can be done on a smartphone app for Android or iOS.
