It’s been a year since DuckDuckGo announced its Email Protection service, a feature designed to increase user privacy, as it avoids the trackers that usually come with the emails we receive, especially from businesses.
However, this service remained on a waiting list system for anyone who wanted to use it…until now. Although still in beta phase, the duck company has announced that everyone can use it from now on
The difference with the iCloud+ service
This service allows you to choose an email address ending in @duck.com. Apple allows something like this through iCloud through the “Hide My Email” service as part of iCloud+, except that here we can choose the alias we want for the mail.
In iCloud, a format is always generated that consists of two random dictionary words separated by a period and followed by a number and another letter. For example, “reasons.carnival2w”. In DuckDuckGo we can choose a format that is easier to remember and faster to type, such as ‘1994’, ‘mgb’, ‘carlos7’ or similar.
such a service it serves to avoid having to leave our real email addresswith which we can likely be identified, when we register for a web service, a newsletter or in any other type of online exchange.
When we use an email like the one ending in @duck.com, the service takes care of deleting open trackers and forward mail to our usual address. The replies are also from that email, not the real one.
Also modify inbound links with unique identifierslike those of newsletters or bulk emails from businesses, so the sender can’t tell which link we’re clicking on. In addition, it changes HTTP addresses to HTTPS if this version is available to increase security when accessing them.
According to DuckDuckGo, 85% of the emails they’ve handled in that first year of service include some type of follow-up. You can use this feature by activating it from the iOS or Mac app (in beta).