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How Shroud.email protects your privacy

Apr 11, 2022

Our approach to privacy

It’s not easy to retain your privacy on the Internet. Trackers follow your footsteps as you browse the web and analytics services log your every click. And you’re not safe from this even when you’re reading your emails. Spy pixels 🕵️ will phone home to tell the sender that you read their email, and even where you were when you read it.

Shroud.email uses several techniques to block this creepy behaviour so you can read your emails with peace of mind.

Firstly, disposable email aliases let you hide your identity online. When a website asks for your email for any reason, you can give it a unique email address that you don’t use anywhere else. This way, it can’t be cross-referenced with your behaviour across the Internet, and the website owner doesn’t know anything about your identity.

Secondly, we block spy pixels. Whenever you receive an email via a Shroud.email alias, we strip out the trackers so you only receive the actual email content. For every email, we’ll show you exactly which trackers we removed. Of course, we don’t save this information anywhere — we store this information in the link to the privacy report, so it’s only ever accessible to you.

The Shroud.email privacy report showing one blocked tracker in an email

Thirdly, Shroud.email proxies all images. We’re pretty proud of our defences against spy pixels, but we believe in defense in depth. Even if a spy pixel were to sneak through, then we’ll proxy it through our servers, which means that the sender never sees your real IP, and thus they don’t know where you were when you read the email.

Finally, privacy is not just about access to your information — it’s also about access to yourself. If one of your aliases starts receiving spam or other unwanted emails, you can easily block the sender and any emails from them will silently disappear into the void. Or, if that’s not enough, you can just delete the alias entirely, never to worry about it again.

Web UI showing how to block a sender in Shroud.email

We’ve put a lot of thought into building a user-friendly email service with powerful privacy protections. Try our free 30-day trial today to give it a go.