email privacy
Back in 2021 I blogged about DuckDuckGo announcing their new privacy-focused duck.com email service. Fast forward to now and it appears as though the service is now open to all. Yay?
Privacy-first mailbox provider ProtonMail looks to be getting deeper into the email privacy game. Earlier this month they purchased a company called SimpleLogin, whose focus seems to be email aliasing and forwarding; sort of like Apple’s “Hide My Email” functionality. The goal seems to be to bring this functionality more natively into the ProtonMail experience. It’s good to have a competitor to Apple also seriously focused on privacy and tracking prevention, for those who want the functionality but don’t want to be part of the Apple universe. But that percentage of people who will be attracted to this, will they be enough to make ProtonMail a profit?
If a historian was ever to document the story of email marketing, we suspect they would look at it from the perspective of before-GDPR and after-GDPR. GDPR wasn’t the first regulation to attempt to clean up the world of email marketing, but it was the first that had real teeth and the promise that it would bite if marketers didn’t comply. Before GDPR, email marketing was still in its Wild West era. After GDPR, email marketing became a much more accountable environment, making the inbox a much more productive and friendly place. The success of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) hasn’t gone unnoticed and is largely being replicated around the world. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and, more recently, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) mirror the GDPR. Like GDPR, both of these laws give regulators the power to go after less-than-scrupulous email marketers…
“It’s like Apple’s new Hide My Email feature, but it works everywhere,” according to The Verge. And it’s powered by email platform Fastmail, perhaps a bit of a niche provider, but I mean that in a good way. Founded in 1999, Fastmail hast a long history in the email space (unlike Hey.com) and they seem to know what they’re doing (look at their recent added support for BIMI). If you want to “hide my email” but don’t want to do it via the Apple ecosystem, it sounds like this is really worth checking out.Click here for more information on Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password.Firefox Relay is another service with a similar aim, perhaps for those who are more into the Mozilla mindset, if there is such a thing. I actually haven’t heard of anybody expressing a lot of interest in this one, have you?The big question for me, for all…