Maski vs DuckDuckGo Email Protection: free is the whole argument, and it is a strong one

This is the shortest of these pages, because DuckDuckGo Email Protection is free, effectively unlimited, strips trackers out of your mail on the way through, and comes from a company whose entire business depends on not being caught misusing it.

I am not going to build a paragraph explaining why my paid thing beats a free thing at being free. It does not. If the requirement is zero pounds, the answer is Duck Addresses and you can close this tab.

Here is the narrow strip of ground where I think Maski is a better fit.

One is a feature, the other is a product

Email Protection is something DuckDuckGo built next to a search engine and a browser. That is not a criticism. It is why it can be free forever and why it does not need to justify itself with a roadmap.

But it also sets the ceiling. Their help pages describe address generation, forwarding and tracker removal, and they are honest that the compose mechanism is something they intend to improve in future updates. There is no plan tier where you get more, because there are no tiers.

Maski is the whole product rather than a feature beside one, which cuts both ways. It means per-sender rules and custom domains and a support address that answers. It also means it has to charge you eventually, and DuckDuckGo never will.

What matters, side by side

Maski compared with DuckDuckGo Email Protection on price, aliases included, custom domains, replying to a forwarded message, and sending a new message from the alias.
Compared on	Maski	DuckDuckGo Email Protection
Price	Free, or $4.99 a month for Pro Buys the alias service itself. No mailbox or storage is bundled in. Pro is free for a year for the first 1,000 sign-ups.	Free No paid tier is offered. What Email Protection is — DuckDuckGo Email Protection, opens in a new tab
Aliases included	10 on Free, 25 on Pro	Effectively unlimited, with a daily creation cap they do not publish Their words, with a daily creation cap they do not publish. How many addresses — DuckDuckGo Email Protection, opens in a new tab
Custom domains	Yes, on Pro Bring your own domain. Maski can publish the DNS records for supported providers.	Not stated Custom domains are not mentioned anywhere in DuckDuckGo's Email Protection help pages. Their article on creating multiple custom Duck Addresses is about the @duck.com handle, not about using a domain you own.
Reply to a forwarded message	Yes, on Pro The alias stays in the From address. Your real address is never disclosed to the sender.	Yes, free Documented, with an SPF caveat on some senders. Replying — DuckDuckGo Email Protection, opens in a new tab
Send a new message from the alias	Yes, on Pro You compose in your own mail client and address the message through Maski, so the alias is the sender.	Yes, from the personal address, by encoding the recipient The recipient is encoded into the address. Scoped to the personal @duck.com address. Composing a new email — DuckDuckGo Email Protection, opens in a new tab

Verified 11 September 2026. I re-check every figure on its source page, and this date only moves when the whole table has been checked again.

Sending means putting the recipient inside the address

DuckDuckGo does support starting a new message from your Duck Address, and the mechanism is clever. You encode the recipient into the address itself. Their own worked example is brian_at_gmail.com_jane@duck.com.

It works. I have used it. But you are hand-assembling an address every time, it is scoped to your one personal Duck Address rather than the generated private ones, and it is not something you will do twice in front of a client.

Replying is much cleaner and works properly, with a caveat they document about SPF on some senders.

There is nothing about custom domains, anywhere

I read the entire Email Protection help tree looking for this. Custom domains are not mentioned. Not refused, not listed as unsupported. Just absent.

I want to be precise, because this is exactly where comparison pages lie: I am not telling you DuckDuckGo cannot do custom domains. I am telling you their documentation does not discuss it, and that if you want you@yourname.com to be the address you hand people, you will not find out how from their site.

There is an article about creating multiple custom Duck Addresses, which sounds like it answers this and does not. It is about the @duck.com handle.

Every address lives and dies with the @duck.com domain

Same structural point as Relay. Addresses on somebody else’s domain cannot follow you anywhere. If you ever want out, every account you registered with a Duck Address needs its email changed by hand, one at a time.

On your own domain that migration is a DNS change and an afternoon. That is the actual argument for paying for any of this.

BE HONEST: when DuckDuckGo is the right call

It costs nothing and it always will. There is no paid tier to be upsold into and no trial that lapses. For an enormous number of people that ends the discussion, correctly.

Effectively unlimited addresses. Their help pages say effectively unlimited, with an unpublished daily cap to stop abuse. In practice you will not hit it.

It removes trackers. Maski does not do this. Email Protection strips tracking pixels and link trackers out of the message body before it reaches you, which is a genuinely different kind of protection from hiding your address, and it is one I do not offer.

It is already in the browser and the apps you may use. No extra account, no card on file, no second thing to remember.

Is one of those the reason you would not switch?

Then tell me which one. If the thing keeping you on DuckDuckGo Email Protection is a feature I do not have yet, I would rather hear it from you than guess at it, and a short note saying what you need and what you are using it for is worth more to me than any amount of competitor research.

Write to jay@maski.dev and it comes to me. If you would rather it went to the support queue, use hey@maski.dev. I cannot promise to build everything, and I will not pretend otherwise, but nothing gets built that nobody asked for.

Use both. Seriously.

Duck Addresses for the signups you will never answer. A Maski alias for the ones where you need your own domain, or a reply that looks professional, or the ability to block one sender without killing the address. The free plan costs nothing to try alongside it.

Start free Read the other comparisons