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Antonello Zanini for Writech

Posted on • Originally published at writech.run

You Can Now Create a Secure DuckDuckGo Email Account

As you may already know, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that promises to keep your searches anonymous while providing a built-in tracker blocker. This makes it harder for the websites you visit to gather information about you. In other words, DuckDuckGo allows you to surf the Internet without companies taking control of your personal information.

DuckDuckGo US market share [Source]

DuckDuckGo just launched the possibility of creating a @duck.com email address. One year after launching the private beta version of the Email Protection program, the service is now accessible to everyone.

Let's learn more about it.

What Does the DuckDuckGo Email Service Offer?

The DuckDuckGo email service enables you to create a personal "duck" address or protect an existing private address. Specifically, the DuckDuckGo email service prevents companies from detecting your email address and using it to send you promotional messages or for profiling purposes.

In essence, DuckDuckGo removes location trackers that are triggered when an email is opened and can detect not only when an email was opened, but also the location and device used. In addition, the DuckDuckGo email service provides details on how many trackers it removed and the companies they belong to. Once cleaned, the email received in your @duck.com email address gets automatically delivered by Email Protection to your inbox.

Personal vs. Private DuckDuckGo Email Addresses

As mentioned above, you can apply for two types of addresses: personal and private ones. Let's now understand the differences between the two.

Personal DuckDuckGo Email Addresses

A personal DuckDuckGo email address involves a name of your choice (e.g., maria.williams@duck.com) and is a brand-new email address equipped with all the protection features presented earlier.

Private DuckDuckGo Email Addresses

To protect your private email address with DuckDuckGo, you have to follow a more complex procedure. Basically, the DuckDuckGo email service creates a randomly generated address, linked to your real address, each time you fill out an online form to make it more difficult to track you down. This newly created address will be used instead of your original email address. Then, the cleaned email will be forwarded to your original address.

How To Try The DuckDuckGo Email Service

As the beta version opens to the public, DuckDuckGo just introduced new features to its Email Protection service. These include the removal of trackers embedded in images and the ability to reply to emails directly from the @duck addresses.

To try the beta, simply download the DuckDuckGo browser extension, available for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. Alternatively, you can install the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser app on iOS, Android, and Mac (keep in mind that it is still in beta).

Conclusion

In recent years, the DuckDuckGo search engine has become increasingly popular. This is because DuckDuckGo places a lot of emphasis on privacy and data protection. Now DuckDuckGo has just launched an email service, and here you had an opportunity to take a look at everything you should know about it.

Thanks for reading! I hope that you found this article helpful.


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