DuckDuckGo Email Protection is free, instant, needs no domain, strips email trackers, and lets you reply from your address. On cost and convenience it beats us outright. The trade-off is that your addresses live on @duck.com — a namespace DuckDuckGo controls. Don't SPAM Me costs a domain and gives you the namespace, plus attribution showing which company leaked each address. If you want zero-cost, zero-setup protection, use DuckDuckGo.
Comparison
| DuckDuckGo Email Protection | Don't SPAM Me | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free software + your domain |
| Setup | Minutes, no DNS | Domain + DNS records, once |
| Address domain | @duck.com (DuckDuckGo's) | Yours |
| Addresses | 1 personal + unlimited private | Unlimited |
| Create an address | Extension / app / manually | Automatic on first mail |
| Reply from the address | ✓ | ✗ Not yet |
| Email tracker removal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Deactivate individual addresses | ✓ | ✓ (hard SMTP 550) |
| Per-alias spam attribution | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leak alerts naming the new sender | ✗ | ✓ |
| Survives you leaving the provider | ✗ | ✓ |
What DuckDuckGo does better
Most of the practical things, and it would be dishonest to bury that.
- It's free. Not free-with-an-asterisk. No domain, no subscription, nothing.
- Setup is minutes. No DNS records, no registrar, no renewal to remember.
- Replies work. You can answer from a Duck Address with your real address hidden. We can't do this at all yet.
- It strips email trackers. Genuinely useful and outside what we do — remote images and pixels that report when you opened a message get removed in transit.
- Unlimited private addresses, generated on the fly through the browser extension or apps.
For a large number of people that is simply the better product, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The one thing we do that it can't
Your Duck Addresses end in @duck.com. That domain belongs to DuckDuckGo.
In practice that means the addresses work for as long as your relationship with DuckDuckGo does. If you ever want to leave — for any reason, including reasons that don't exist yet — every address you handed out has to be changed at every service that uses it. Each change means logging in, editing the account, and confirming via a link sent to the new address. For a few dozen addresses that's an afternoon. For several hundred, attached to banks and utilities and government services, it's a project. Any account you can't get into because its reset goes to the old address is a support ticket.
With aliases on a domain you own, changing provider is a DNS change. The addresses never change, so nothing needs updating anywhere. That's the entire argument, and it's worked through in what happens to your aliases if the service shuts down.
DuckDuckGo is an established company and there's no particular reason to expect Email Protection to disappear. The realistic scenarios aren't dramatic — you want to change provider, or a product gets discontinued while the company carries on. The question isn't whether DuckDuckGo is trustworthy. It's whether you'd rather the answer depended on that at all.
The second difference: attribution
Both products stop a company learning your real address. Only one tells you what the company did with the one you gave them.
Every Don't SPAM Me alias has its own spam statistics. When a sender that isn't the original company first emails an alias, you get an alert naming that sender's domain, and a Data Sellers list builds up over time. It turns aliasing from a shield into a record of who behaved badly.
You can approximate this manually with Duck Addresses by noting which address received the spam — the information is there if you're paying attention. The difference is whether the tool does the noticing.
Which to choose
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want protection today at zero cost | DuckDuckGo |
| Don't want to own or maintain a domain | DuckDuckGo |
| Need to reply from your alias | DuckDuckGo |
| Want email trackers stripped | DuckDuckGo |
| Are using aliases for a handful of newsletters | DuckDuckGo |
| Will route banking, medical and government mail through aliases | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want the addresses to outlive the provider | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want to know which company leaked each address | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want addresses that exist without creating them first | Don't SPAM Me |
The verdict
These optimise for different things and the honest recommendation depends on how much you're going to depend on the addresses.
Casual use — newsletters, one-off signups, keeping your real address off forms — makes DuckDuckGo the obvious choice. It's free, it's quick, it has features we lack, and the cost of losing those addresses one day is close to zero.
If per-service addresses are going to become the contact of record for the accounts that matter, the namespace question stops being theoretical, and that's where paying for a domain earns its keep.
There's also no rule against starting with DuckDuckGo and moving later. It costs you the migration described above — which is precisely the cost the owned-domain approach exists to avoid, and a decent way to find out first-hand whether the argument holds.
More: vs SimpleLogin · email aliases explained · how to stop spam emails