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There is also the issue of security. If you have any contact information (e.g. your email address, work and phone number, supervisor contact info) or your signature added to the out-of-office reply, it could help scammers piece together the elements needed for identity theft. When your auto-reply is turned on and someone sends you a message, your mail server will send the out of office reply back to the spammers, confirming that your email address is a valid one.

The privacy centric DuckDuckGo has had what it calls an "Email Protection" service in beta since July of last year, 2021. But they have just opened it to the public. It looks like a very useful and completely FREE service. So our listeners might want to jump over and grab their name or their favorite handle quickly before it's taken. I'll explain how to do that, then I'll tell you why this seems like a nifty service...

I wanted to also note that the Brave browser's 2021 usage more than doubled from its previous year. Brave began 2021 with 24.1 million users and ended the year with 50.2 million users, for a 220% growth during 2021. And this growth is also exponential since Brave has been more than doubling their user base every year, now for the past five years.

DuckDuckGo is picking up the pace of its continued growth: