DuckDuckGo Email Protection is free, unlimited, supports replies and strips email trackers — so there are only three real reasons to look elsewhere: you want the addresses on a domain you own, you want attribution rather than just masking, or you need something specific it doesn't offer. If none applies, staying is the right answer and no alternative will improve on the price.
What you'd be giving up
Worth being precise, because it's a genuinely strong free product: one personal Duck Address plus unlimited private ones, forwarding to your existing inbox, replies supported so the recipient sees the Duck Address, removal of multiple types of hidden email trackers, and individual addresses deactivatable. No paid tier, no upsell. From DuckDuckGo's own help pages. Checked: 2026-08-19.
Reason 1 — You want to own the namespace
Every Duck Address ends @duck.com. Leave DuckDuckGo — for any reason, including ones that don't exist yet — and every address you handed out needs replacing at every service using it. That's an afternoon for thirty addresses and a project for three hundred, with any account you can't recover becoming a permanent loss.
Options with your own domain: SimpleLogin Premium ($36/yr), Proton Pass Plus ($35.88/yr, bundled with a password manager), addy.io Pro (€3/mo, open source and self-hostable), or Don't SPAM Me (no subscription; you supply the domain). Prices from each provider's own pages. Checked: 2026-08-19 / 2026-08-22.
How much this matters scales with how much depends on the addresses. Twenty newsletters: irrelevant. Two hundred accounts including your bank: it's the whole decision. The argument
Reason 2 — You want attribution
Duck Addresses mask well and tell you nothing about what happened afterwards. You can infer it by noticing which address received the spam.
Don't SPAM Me does the noticing: per-alias spam statistics, an alert naming the new sender's domain when an address is first contacted by someone other than the original company, and a running list of which companies leaked you.
Reason 3 — Something specific
| You want | Go to |
|---|---|
Readable addresses (ikea@ not a random string) | Any own-domain service |
| Open source, or self-hosting | addy.io |
| GPG-encrypted forwarding | addy.io |
| A password manager in the same subscription | Proton Pass Plus |
| Multiple mailboxes, PGP, subdomains | SimpleLogin Premium |
| Phone number masking too | Firefox Relay |
| Deep OS integration on Apple devices | Apple Hide My Email |
What you lose by leaving
Two things worth weighing, because most alternatives don't have them:
- Email tracker removal. DuckDuckGo strips trackers from forwarded mail. Firefox Relay does too. We don't, and neither do most paid alias services. That's a real privacy feature you'd be giving up. Why it matters
- Replies. Free, and works. We don't support replying from an alias at all.
If either matters to you, that's a strong reason to stay put. The direct comparison
The honest recommendation
For casual use — newsletters, one-off signups, keeping your real address off forms — DuckDuckGo is hard to beat and switching would be a downgrade.
Move when per-service addresses have become the contact of record for accounts you'd hate to lose. At that point the namespace question stops being theoretical and a domain earns its cost. Until then, you're already using the right tool.