I was pleasantly surprised to see this email on my inbox earlier this evening:
I have written about DuckDuckGo's Email Protection feature in the past. It's a service that removes trackers in your emails before they hit your inbox. Some may not like the idea of DuckDuckGo being able to read/do that, but it's okay in the large sense because your email host could very well be reading your emails. Most promise not to, but we never know. Email in general is not a secure protocol for communication. One must be using Signal for such communication.
Getting back to the original point, DuckDuckGo is no longer a search company. They are expanding fast into various territories including the above-discussed email service and ad and tracker blocker across all apps and websites on Android: App Tracking Protection.
In an interview with Protocol, DuckDuckGo's CEO, which they are doing well:
I think part of the reason there is, a lot of privacy products were not companies. They weren't built with high-quality UX in mind. They were often run by enthusiasts who had the best intentions in mind, but they weren't trying to build businesses to compete with the biggest tech companies in the world, like we are. We need to change that narrative over time. There are a couple headwinds on that, though, just to be completely frank about it. One is, people just think it's not even possible to get privacy. And so we have to educate them that this easy button is real. We have to explain to them, yes, if you stop the trackers from loading, they won't track you.
Their daily search query traffic has surpassed 100 million as well. This success is a great testament to a fantastic product suite that they are building. There's no stopping from here. I am rooting for them. I'd be a paid customer when they announce one.
There's also SimpleLogin of which I am a very happy customer. With DuckDuckGo announcing a full-fledged email service now, I am torn between the two, but I'd remain a SimpleLogin customer and split between the two. They have been fantastic over the last two years.