After a year of private beta testing, DuckDuckGo has made its email privacy tools available to everyone, so you can keep your real email address hidden and minimize tracking by marketers.
DuckDuckGo offers two main ways of protecting email privacy:
- Anti-tracking: Get a duck.com email address (mine’s newmy@duck.com) to hand out instead of your actual email address. DuckDuckGo will block known trackers before passing the messages along to your actual email inbox, so that marketers—or anyone using read receipts—can’t see whether you opened their emails. (Just note that this may not prevent tracking the links you click on.)
- Masking: Generate randomized email addresses (such as w11tzqdr@duck.com) that forward to your actual address and can be blocked at any time. This is useful for creating extra accounts on websites and cutting off email spam. It’s also a great deterrent against targeted ads, as your true email address is pure gold for tracking purposes.
You’ll find these tools inside the DuckDuckGo app for iOS and Android by hitting the ⋮ icon, then heading to Settings > Email Protection. You can also use DuckDuckGo’s desktop browser extension to generate masked email addresses, but note that this requires setting DuckDuckGo as your default search engine.
DuckDuckGo isn’t the only company that’s working on email privacy. Apple’s Mail app now thwarts trackers by default, and its Hide My Mail service can generate masked emails for iCloud+ subscribers. I also still like the free email masking services Abine Blur and Anonaddy, which I wrote about last year.
But if you’re already using DuckDuckGo’s browser or search engine, its masking tools are a natural fit, and its anti-tracking email address is worth handing out even if you never use DuckDuckGo’s other services.
This tip first appeared in Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up to get a free tech tip every Tuesday.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
In December 2023, I wrote an article exploring Apple CEO Tim Cook’s most likely successors, because t
“Meta profits, kids pay the price,” was the message delivered by dozens of grieving families at the doors of Meta’s Manhattan office on Thursday.
Forty-five families traveled from
The world’s auto industry is getting a shake-up from Chinese automakers that
There’s Blue Sky and then there’s Bluesky.
Blue Sky, a paper goods company
Google’s profits soared 50% in this year’s opening quart
One of the central arguments in the ongoing antitrust trial against G
The AI revolution is redefining business and tech leadership—and no one is standing more squarely on the front lines than product leaders.
Once seen as a behind-the-scenes role, the CPO
