Your email just got more private and secure: Here’s how
Don’t give up your email so easily now
With the amount of tracking taking place on the internet; especially through email, DuckDuckGo has come up with an anti-tracking solution called DuckDuckGo email protection.
Using this service, you can create a @duck.com mail id that will forward the emails to your personal mail id. This is not a fully functional email service. Instead, it works as an email forwarding service, but on steroids. They strip away all the trackers before they forward the mail to your inbox. They also provide information on how many trackers they removed, what companies appear to be behind them and etc.
They provide two types of Duck addresses.
- Personal Duck address: The emails sent to this Duck address will be forwarded to your personal email id. However, all the trackers from the email will be stripped off and they’ll give all the information about the trackers as mentioned above.
- Unique Private Duck address: When you want to try a new website, DDG will detect the email field and generate a unique Duck address (example: hg6h2g@duck.com) so you need not give up your personal email id on a website you’re not sure yet. You can delete these unique duck addresses anytime so can no longer hear from those websites again.
How to create a personal Duck address??
It’s all fine. But how can we create a Duck address?
For that, you will need to install their mobile browser or their browser extension. After that,
- Open DuckDuckGo mobile browser.
- Open settings, scroll down to Email protection and open it.
- It will ask you to create a Duck address, enter the username and your personal inbox mail id.
- You created your Duck mail address.
How to create a unique private duck address?
When you don’t want to enter your Personal Duck address into a new website or a newsletter, you can generate a private duck address that you can use for that website.
When you open a website, DuckDuckGo will automatically detect the email field and suggest you use your personal Duck address or a private Duck address, it’ll autofill the field with a private Duck address. Or you can open the browser extension and copy the address from the bottom.
How to deactivate a private Duck address?
You can deactivate a private Duck address from the inbox itself.
- Click on the more option at the top of the email.
2. Now click on deactivate option. This will deactivate the mail ID. So you need not hear from that website again.
You can reactivate the mail address if you change your mind.
This is a great tool to protect your mail ID online. So, do take advantage of the same. If you like this article, please give it a clap.
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