¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

One of my best discoveries this year: DuckDuckGo email protection:

DuckDuckGo Email Protection is a free email forwarding service that removes multiple types of hidden email trackers and lets you create multiple unique private email addresses on the fly. Email Protection works with your current email account – no need to change providers or juggle multiple inboxes.

Previously: https://10minutemail.com, https://dispostable.com, etc.

DuckDuckGo is (IMHO) better. Why?

• First of all, you can create a memorable and fixed email, which acts as an entrypoint. For example, foo@duck.com. In principle you could keep using this email for all new services, especially when in a hurry. Emails delivered there get redirected to a forwarding email of your choice. Thus this integrates with your existing setup, and there’s no need to bypass CAPTCHAs just for the sake of reading emails, and you get to optionally keep them archived should you want to.
• The added value comes from throwaway, disposable emails though: DuckDuckGo allows you to generate one-off emails in the form word1-word2-word3@duck.com. You can create as many of these as you want, with a single click. These also get redirected to the previously specified forwarding email address.
• The emails are scrubbed so to remove tracking and analytics. You get to know whether there were any trackers in the original email and, if yes, which ones were removed.
• You can disassociate these emails at any time. It’s very easy to do so, by clicking a link that is embedded into each received email.
• @duck.com tends to be more reputable than other email services. Which means, chances are, it is less likely to be blocked. I ran into roadblocks many times when trying to use @dispostable.com to sign up with throwaway accounts.
• It’s completely free! A comparable service is iCloud+ Hide My Email by Apple, but it’s not free. Also, the Duck emails are manageable from the web, whereas iCloud+ can only be managed from Apple devices (as far as I know).
• It integrates seamlessly with sign-up flows if you use its Chrome extension. Similar to how password managers typically integrate with sign-up forms.
• The DuckDuckGo mobile app also supports it.

Ever since adopting this workflow I find it’s much easier to sign up to try out new services and/or websites, without having to use my personal email and worrying whether it would be possible to delete my account later on.

Furthermore it’s very easy to organize these emails in my client, as all I have to do is match emails coming from @duck.com.

And I don’t have to worry about “wasting” my personal domain email address space with catch-all sign-ups (e.g. foo at perrotta . dev).

The only downside is that it’s not possible to send emails from these addresses. Therefore, it’s not an universal solution.

Update(2025-05-10): Alternative: Simple Login by Proton.