DuckDuckGo Launches New Email Protection Service To Remove Trackers (theverge.com) 45
DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox. From a report: The company's new Email Protection feature gives users a free "@duck.com" email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo's mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions.
The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.
The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.
Re: First (Score:2, Offtopic)
Yes, in China they just weld the doors shut on the state apartment buildings for two weeks, brilliant!
Now try that in America, UK, France, Germany, Italy, etc. - countless millions will starve without Amazon, door dash or Uber eats...
The Anti-Vaxxers aren't all Republicans, as a recent CNN report showed the majority were apolitical, with an even mix of democrat and republicans saying they won't take the vaccine.
And besides, what does this have to do with DuckDuckGo's email offering?
Yes, feed the ducks (Score:1)
I like this idea. I also hope they just start calling themselves duck.
Re: (Score:2)
I like this idea. I also hope they just start calling themselves duck.
I'm waiting for a spinoff project called "GooseGooseWent" ...
This requires much trust (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It will get banned for sign ups anyway. Anything that lets you create disposable addresses gets banned for signing up to stuff.
The spammers know how to strip the +spam thing from Gmail too.
Only available for cell phones too (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I'm not installing an app just to make an email feature work.
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't the point of this Web 2.0 and cloud stuff that we wouldn't need special apps for everything. That we can run things on a server or in our browser?
Re: (Score:2)
Luckily the DDG app is just a browser!
Re: (Score:2)
The app is probably too protect them.
Notice how you can't get an email address without a phone number from most places now? Well you can get phone numbers for a few bucks if you really want, but an app can grab the phone's unique ID like IMEI.
Re: (Score:1)
good - install the app because its the actual duck duck go BROWSER
its a setting inside that allows to to be put on a whitelist beta for the email program....
Re: (Score:2)
The spammers know how to strip the +spam thing from Gmail too.
I use protonmail to manage my domain email and I use noreply+whatever@ so that when they strip it, they get an email bounce. :)
Re: (Score:2)
It will get banned for sign ups anyway. Anything that lets you create disposable addresses gets banned for signing up to stuff.
The spammers know how to strip the +spam thing from Gmail too.
The same thing can work for other domains though, if you run your own mail server. I use '_' as the separator in mine, works great.
Re: This requires much trust (Score:2)
I have my doubts about 'trackers' in emails, I thought the issue was looking at email content to determine your interests.
Why don’t they just launch a normal email se (Score:2)
Launch? (Score:5, Informative)
They started a wait-list for a beta.
Re: (Score:2)
They started a wait-list for a beta.
And only if you have smartphone (see step 1 below). Most people I know who care about this sort of thing -- including me -- do not own such a thing.
Steps to get on the waitlist:
1. Download DuckDuckGo for iOS or Android
2. Open Settings > Beta Features > Email Protection
3. Click “Join the Private Waitlist."
Re: (Score:2)
You could do something like bluestack
Re: (Score:2)
Setting up Bluestack sounds like more work than not using DDG's beta email protection. Maybe use Firefox Relay [firefox.com] for now until something better comes along.
Re: (Score:2)
@duck.com banned in 3.. 2.. 1.. (Score:2)
Trigger happy spam filters (Score:5, Informative)
I have been using something like this for 20 years - the @iki.fi. It's run by a nonprofit. They do spam filtering including graylisting and similar things to your mails as they come in, and outside e-mails also allow you do http redirects to your homepage and also provide a domain name for you if you like (or an entire subdomain if needed).
Anyway, with mails, the big problem is that some mail providers either classify the forwarded mails as spam or reject them altogether, because the mails are not arriving from the servers where the SPF records point to. Combine this with whatever spam blacklists they use and suddely mails do not make it. O365 (Outlook.com) rejects some mails altogether, Gmail seems to work better in the sense that they just put them to spam folder. If incoming mails get classified as spam, a workaround for some of these is to add the senders to your address book. However, if they are rejected at SMTP level then nothing much you can do.
Protonmail (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
translation: 50 rows in a database costs 24 euros/month.
Re: Protonmail (Score:2)
Right, their servers and admins all work for free - it's a public service!
Re: (Score:2)
Any guess as to the mark-up? 1000X? 1mX ?
old duck.com email address (Score:1)
Maybe I can get my old duck.com email address and see how much spam it still gets
For reference:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
This is a client-side feature not server-side (Score:5, Informative)
Blocking trackers seems like something that should be done on the client-side, not the server-side. The client (even a web client) should simply not display any remote content. There's no need to pass all your email to a third-party site just for this feature.
U will acknowledge that there is value in doing so in order to mass train a filter. But not for removing trackers.
won't work (Score:1)
sign-up sites will just forbid @duck.com and anything similar, problem solved for them
Re: (Score:1)
+1. Many sites prevent you from signing up with mailinator.com and similar email addresses, and they may well do the same with duck.com.
Damn email I hate it (Score:2)
SimpleLogin (Score:2)
The software behind it is entirely open source, so if you want (and can) you can host it yourself. I decided I couldn't be bothered with that, so I am paying for the service. I have my own domain, but I can also use one of theirs whenever I feel like it. I am fowarding to an icloud email and so far only couple of marketing emails from bangood have bounced (the service will notify you if a forwarded email
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks much for posting that. Been looking for a modern and complete open source replacement to a 15+year temp email service I've been using. But also one that my non-tech family members could also adopt. Somehow missed this one, definitely looks like it checks off enough boxes to meet the criteria and a clear path to self hosting as a backup.
Treating the Symptoms (Score:2)
That wound is the whole-scale abuse of spam all across the internet.
We already have laws in place, such as the CAN-SPAM Act [ftc.gov], which could be better employed to address this problem.
In the past, when law enforcement have looked in to abuse of email addresses and spam, we've learned that a relatively tiny number of individuals are
Re: Treating the Symptoms (Score:2)
I'm confused, are you upset that the government reads all your emails or that it isn't effectively filtering out spam email for you?
Personally, I don't want the government deciding which emails I receive and which I don't.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that a huge amount of spam originates from outside US jurisdiction. (Same with robocalls.)
Not really necessary (Score:1)
I've never understood why people feel the urge to load images from emails. That's turned off by default, and should stay that way. Over the years I've seen a few companies send HTML-only emails without a plain text variant - that's an immediate unsubscribe. Problem solved from my end.
Strong Alternatives (Score:1)