DOCTOR
THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES...
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Free VPNs provide good—if limited—online privacy and protection.
Email alternatives
I was advised to use DuckDuckGo Email Protection (https://duckduckgo.com/email/) to improve my email privacy, so set up free Duck.com email addresses for myself and my family. Sadly, they stopped working. DuckDuckGo told me my email provider has started rejecting the emails as spam. Is there any way to overcome this, as we’ve given our Duck.com address to many companies? Or is there an alternative?
–Bob White
THE DOCTOR RESPONDS:
How ironic that your email provider has decreed that messages sent from the DuckDuckGo servers are spam, given its sole job is to strip trackers and other spam-like behavior from emails. The Doc assumes that by ‘rejected’, your provider isn’t forwarding the mails (while marking them as spam) but bouncing them back to the sender. The first option is a simple fix: Check your spam or junk folder and look for options to mark the emails as safe or trusted.
This leaves two options: Choose an alternative email forwarding provider, such as Addy.io (https://addy.io), or reroute your Duck.com emails to a different email provider. The first option probably isn’t practical as the likes of Addy.io exist solely to hide your email address from third parties, not vet the emails to remove any tracking information.
That leaves you with the option of forwarding your Duck.com emails to a different email address with a provider that won’t start rejecting them. To be clear, the Doc isn’t suggesting you ditch your current email address as that would be impractical. Instead, you’ll use it solely for direct personal and (if applicable) professional correspondence. You’d then set up a secondary address with another provider specifically to deal with companies and other organizations. This might be a webmail provider, such as Gmail or Microsoft (Live. com), or a free mailbox with someone like Proton (https://proton.me).