Last year, DuckDuckGo announced a free service designed to fend off email trackers and help people protect their privacy. The Email Protection beta was initially available through a waitlist. Now, it’s now in open beta, meaning everyone can try it without having to wait for access.
Email Protection is a forwarding service that removes trackers from messages. DuckDuckGo will tell you which trackers it scrubs as well. During the waitlist beta, DuckDuckGo says it found trackers in 85 percent of testers’ emails.
Anyone can now sign up for an @duck.com email address, which will work across desktop, iOS and Android. DuckDuckGo says you can create unlimited private email addresses, including a throwaway one for every website, if you prefer. You can also deactivate an address at any time.
The company has been beefing up Email Protection with more privacy-focused measures. It says Link Tracking Protection helps prevent tracking in email links, while Smarter Encryption upgrades unencrypted HTTP links in emails to secure HTTPS links whenever possible. On top of that, you can now reply to messages with an @duck.com address instead of your regular email account.
Email Protection is available on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for iOS and Android. Go to the Email Protection section of the settings to try it. On desktop, you’ll need the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Brave or DuckDuckGo’s Mac browser. Simply visit the email section of the company’s website.