DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused company, and it tries to continue to hold on to that fact.
After the public found that it was doing what it's not supposed to, when DuckDuckGo was reportedly allowing certain scripts from Bing and LinkedIn were allowed to run on DuckDuckGo's browser and extension, the company quickly responded by blocking Microsoft's trackers altogether.
Following that, staying true to its original intention, DuckDuckGo continues its quest to preserve users' privacy.
This time, the company announced that its Email Protection service, while still in beta, is finally available to everyone.
Previously, there was a waitlist.
"We’ve removed the waitlist for DuckDuckGo Email Protection, making the beta open for everyone to try," said DuckDuckGo’s Omid Majdi. "We’ve also added new features like Link Tracking Protection that helps prevent tracking in email links, Smarter Encryption that helps with unencrypted email links, and the ability to reply directly from your Duck Addresses."
The company announced a service which can strip emails from any embedded trackers.
Calling it the 'Email Protection', the service provides users with a "Personal Duck Address" (@duck.com) that receives the emails, to then remove hidden data collection items like tracking pixels inside images, to then forward the emails to users' regular inbox, like Gmail, Yahoo! or any other.
DuckDuckGo's Email Protection is an automated process that does not read or save users' emails.
What it does, is to just detect those pesky trackers, remove them, and send the email to the users as the intended recipients.
After that, Email Protection permanently deletes the email from its server.
Besides removing trackers, Email Protection can also tell users the type and number of trackers removed from each email.
What's more, this tool goes well with DuckDuckGo's app or extension, in which users can anonymize their email address by creating a random Private Duck Address, to then use with websites and services that may want to spam or share email data with third parties.
However, as opposed to Personal Duck Addresses, Private Duck Addresses are literally on-demand anonymous accounts, meaning that they are disposable.
Users can deactivate them at any time if spam gets out of control.
It's worth noting that to use this Email Protection, users are required to be in the DuckDuckGo ecosystem, so to speak.
That is, users should sign-up for the service only using DuckDuckGo products: either the DuckDuckGo mobile app on Android or iPhone, the DuckDuckGo web browser beta on Mac, or a desktop web browser that uses the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension.
In the latter two cases, users can sign up for Email Protection by navigating to duckduckgo.com/email.
There, users have to create an @duck.com email address, and associate email address with their existing email address.
It's only after that, that any email sent to the new address will automatically be forwarded to the existing email address, with all email trackers removed.
Then, any email sent to the new address will be forwarded to your existing address with the email trackers removed and you can access them normally.