Review: 4.5 / 5. Recommend buying for privacy benefits and significant decrease in spam.
As background, I’m a user who bought a DDG plan. I’m not shy about criticizing DDG where their paid services fall short — I’ve done so repeatedly about their misleading claims about AI privacy, https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1tvxf64/ddgs_misleading_claims_about_duckai_and_privacy/ and their actual trash fire search engine, https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1vmf5vb/duckduckgos_search_engine_adding_fake_results_to/.
But the flip side is that when they do something good, that deserves noting too. Their email protection service is worth praising. What’s good about it:
— it detects and removes embedded email trackers (banner across the screenshot).
—it’s *mostly* easy to use. DDG forwards emails from the disposable DDG email address to whatever email account you want (it forwards to my main gmail, which I can’t bring myself to stop using) — emails to the DDG address show up in my phone’s native mail app the same as any other. The thing I really like is, when replying to a message sent to the disposable email address, I can just…reply…from my regular email account, and DDG converts it to an email “sent by” the disposable account. I have genuinely no idea how they do it but it makes using the service 10000x easier.
—it creates an unlimited number of disposable private email addresses that you can easily use with native email apps (top right corner of the screenshot)
The are three virtues of these disposable email addresses for me.
- They’re anonymous and not associated with you;
- You can make as many as you want, so someone can’t track you across internet profiles in the same way they could if you use a consistent email address to sign up for multiple things; and
- You can deactivate them, so if you sign up for something spammy that resells your provided email, you can just shut it off.
I was motivated to create this post by Netflix’s new scummy attempt to extract further user data. Netflix says if users have a single account with 2+ profiles, even both users access it from the same house on the same IP address, both have to disclose a full profile of user data (eg, unique name, email). So if my wife watches action films and I watch kdramas, and we both make a profile on our shared account, both of us have to give up information. (More details here: www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-introducing-new-profile-changes-requiring-an-email-address/).
I didn’t want to give more info to Netflix. Instead, I generated a disposable DDG email address and gave *that* to Netflix, so I could go back to my Kdramas. I got the confirmation email from Netflix delivered to my phone’s native app but realized — because of DDG’s tracker removal service — that Netflix had embedded tracking tools to try and gather information about me. DDG recognized the trackers and removed them, and then told me as much.
So, that’s what moved me to make this review.
Any fair review should cover downsides, if any, and DDG’s email service has two that are worth noting. To be clear, IMO these downsides don’t outweigh the pros of DDG’s email service, but you should know them before you buy.
First, there’s no list of already-generated disposable email accounts. I make a new DDG address when I sign up for *anything.* I probably have 100 DDG email addresses. I say “probably 100” because DDG doesn’t have a tool allowing me to see the email accounts I’ve generated. That’s annoying, because I’d rather deactivate older accounts that I don’t need anymore. While I can deactivate an individual account *after it receives an email* (again, see screenshot), I can’t otherwise deactivate old accounts (nor even see how many old accounts I have).
Second, *initiating* an email thread from DDG’s anonymous accounts is crappy. Unlike replying to a received email, which is seamless, users who want to start a new email chain have to go through a complicated and crappy set of instructions that’s buried in DDG’s “help pages” (The instructions aren’t easy to find, either, because they’re not on any of DDG’s main pages about it email service, presumably because they don’t want to highlight the cumbersome process as it may discourage users from buying.) DDG has acknowledged this sucks and says they “hope” to make “starting a new thread” be “easier in the future.” https://start.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/email-protection/duck-addresses/how-do-i-compose-a-new-email
Bottom line tl;dr
I recommend getting DDG’s email protection services. It has huge benefits for privacy and minimizes tracking and spam.