DuckDuckGo Opens Up Its Free Email Privacy Service To Everyone

Last year, DuckDuckGo announced a free service designed to fend off email trackers and help people protect their privacy. The Email Protection beta was initially available through a waitlist. Now, it's now in open beta, meaning everyone can try it without having to wait for access. From a report: Email Protection is a forwarding service that removes trackers from messages. DuckDuckGo will tell you which trackers it scrubs as well. During the waitlist beta, DuckDuckGo says it found trackers in 85 percent of testers' emails. Anyone can now sign up for an @duck.com email address, which will work across desktop, iOS and Android. DuckDuckGo says you can create unlimited private email addresses, including a throwaway one for every website, if you prefer. You can also deactivate an address at any time.

Whew, just in time ...

[fahrbot-bot]

I was checking out a competitor "goose.com" but they kept giving me the run around ...

I used to have a procmail script that did this

[dknj]

1. Lets find our old procmail scripts
2. Turn them into "privacy-masking" services and collect the contents of everyone's personal email
3. ...
4. PROFIT?!

mutt

[manu0601]

Read your e-mail with mutt (or pine, or elm), and you will not care about trackers.

Re:mutt

[antdude]

You can do that in GUI e-mail clients too. Just disable remote images, JS (why even need that?), read receipts, etc.

Re:

[manu0601]

Yes, power users can do that. On that front, mutt is just easier for newbies (I am joking, of course).

Re:

[antdude]

Ha. I remember struggling with mutt after using pine. :)

Any advantage vs just blocking images?

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you use an IMAP client and don't display external images by default, doesn't that pretty much accomplish the same thing?

Re:

[battingly]

No, because you lose the ability to view images. Hardly the same thing.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Typically the only emails where I want to see the images in are the ones from senders that I really don't care that they know I've seen their email.

Re: Any advantage vs just blocking images?

[NawShucksNo]

A better solution is to trip every tracker added with fake data. Make them question the validity of any real data they might get.

How tracking?

[fermion]

If it is images, then just turn off images. Or have them go through a v-n

It was intersting to see the article about websites tracking people who use lockdown mode on Apple because i suspect such people use a VPN. I browse from Belize, so if people come looking for me they do so in one of the highest crime areas in the Americaâ(TM)s.

In any case, I think duck duck go is just trying to starve everyone else. The ads I get on the browser, the results based o. What they want to promote rather than what I

Re: How tracking?

[shawnadam]

What's wrong with Bing? It wouldn't be Christmas without his "White Christmas".

MailScanner for self-serve

[bill_mcgonigle]

Check out MailScanner for self-hosted mail. It's been "defanging" my email for about fifteen years. Adds about a second of latency to a message when running in daemon mode.

Nice of duck to offer such things to the masses, since they mostly use surveillance companies for email providers. Yeah, I'm astonished too.

Re:

[bart_smit]

Second this. For a turnkey implementation with all the trimmings, spin up an instance of eFa: https://efa-project.org/ [efa-project.org]

Not private

[battingly]

I just tried out a private duck address. When you use a private duck address, a reply to the sender reveals your true address in the sender address. Not very private.

Re:

[nadass]

The first generation of their @duck.com service is an email forwarding service whereby all actions occur from the email mailbox.

The "second" generation of the service allows replies to flow through their privacy tracking service, thereby protecting your email mailbox address. But if you do any adjustments to the email message (or change any of the headers, manually or automatically), then the process fails.

So, whatever you do, don't change the headers of the sender or recipient if it's truly a simple em

Re:

[battingly]

So, whatever you do, don't change the headers of the sender or recipient if it's truly a simple email thread.

I didn't change anything. When I tried it, my true email address was presented to the sender as: "my true email address that I want to hide"_"private duck address"@duck.com

Re:

[battingly]

I'm looking at the email that was forwarded through duck.com using a private duck address. My original address that is to be hidden is included in the sender address as: "user name"_at_"domain name".com_"private duck address"@duck.com.

Re:

[battingly]

So you sent yourself a message FROM user name@domain name.com and that's the reply address. Perfectly normal. You sent your FROM address when you sent the mail from your real account to the duck address.

No. I replied to a message that was sent to the private address. That reply I sent contains a FROM address which has an encoding built by duck.com that includes my true address. It's quite easy to parse my original address from that encoded FROM address (it includes "me"_at_"mydomain".com_"private"@duck.com). To be useful, the FROM address needs to hide my original address. That's how other services like this work. It seems to be a simple oversight. I'm sure they'll get it sorted, but in the meantime, don't

Re:

[nadass]

So you sent yourself a message FROM user name@domain name.com and that's the reply address. Perfectly normal. You sent your FROM address when you sent the mail from your real account to the duck address.

No. I replied to a message that was sent to the private address. That reply I sent contains a FROM address which has an encoding built by duck.com that includes my true address. It's quite easy to parse my original address from that encoded FROM address (it includes "me"_at_"mydomain".com_"private"@duck.com). To be useful, the FROM address needs to hide my original address. That's how other services like this work. It seems to be a simple oversight. I'm sure they'll get it sorted, but in the meantime, don't trust this to keep your email address private.

Your FROM gets replaced with your DUCK address before it's actually sent to your recipients. That's what's happening. Your recipients DO NOT see your private address in their FROM field, they only see your DUCK address.

Re:

[battingly]

Your FROM gets replaced with your DUCK address before it's actually sent to your recipients. That's what's happening. Your recipients DO NOT see your private address in their FROM field, they only see your DUCK address.

No. The private duck address that was replaced has the format I mentioned above and it reveals my address. The sender who originally sent to my private duck address now has my true address. I'm looking right at the header and it's there as plain as day. It's obscured, but very weakly, so even a casual inspection reveals my true address to the sender.

Re:

[battingly]

I'll try to explain it one more time:
Sally ([e-mail]) gives Joe [e-mail].
Joe sends email to [e-mail].
Sally receives the message and replies.
Joe sees "[e-mail]" in the reply
From that, Joe can easily deduce Sally's email address

Re:

[battingly]

I'm not theorizing. I'm looking at the sender field in the header in the email I received. Your denials do nothing to change the fact the message I'm looking at exists and is real.

no password?

[FudRucker]

i use the duckduckgo browser, and guess it is tied to my iphone IMEI or SIM (using cellular data)

what if i wanted to access my email from a desktop or laptop with some other browser???
enquiring minds want to know...

Re: no password?

[FudRucker]

never mind, i figured it out, all this does is just forward you email and duckduckgo removes trackers, i guess tracking images and cookies or maybe those unique long URLs that are used to track

Re:

[battingly]

Very true. For a service like this to be effective, it needs to be small enough that hardly anybody has ever heard of it.

Re:

[luvirini]

I have been spamgourmet for years and occasionally hit that type of thing. I have taken that to mean that the site does not want me to register or use them. Luckily for most things there are alternatives.

Spyware disguised as a free service

[bigbang137]

This is spyware disguised as a free service. First, it requires installing and using DDG's app/browser/extension, without which the service cannot be used. You can bet that their browser extension will monitor everything you do. Second, understand that your incoming email will now go to DDG, after which it will be forwarded to you. DDG will effectively therefore read your email.

requires installing a browser extension or an app

[Espectr0]

dumbest decision ever

Sorry, not for email programs !

[swell]

"On desktop, you'll need the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Brave or DuckDuckGo's Mac browser"

If you look at that statement very carefully, you'll notice that those are all browsers. Nary an email program to be found. So how is it going to fix your email? Are there privacy conscious people who get their email from a browser?

Re:

[LainTouko]

Probably, yes. People who have heard about all this getting tracked and don't want it to happen to them, but don't have the technical knowledge to think of, use and configure an email client.

Simple, Stupid.

[BabbleFish]

Isn't this just akin to "don't open images" in email?

Don't be evil...

[berferdiam]

One thing that concerns me about this, is DDG is going to get all my email. And we have all heard the "Don't be evil" lie before...

Trackers in Email???

[gweihir]

That must be fallout from the utterly demented stupidity of mis-using web-browsers as email viewers.