Comments on: Self-deleting sent emails

By: Simon Jones

Simon Jones — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:04:57 +0000

Microsoft’s Information Rights Management (IRM) add-on for Windows and Office will let you set a whole host of restrictions on what the recipient can do with a document or email, including content expiration, but it requires patches to both Windows XP and Office on the sender’s and recipients’ machines and recipients need access to one of your servers which hosts the access keys.

See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101029181033.aspx and https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/rightsmgmt/default.mspx for details.

Simon Jones
Contributing Editor
PC Pro Magazine

By: Paul Ockenden

Paul Ockenden — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:58:25 +0000

With ‘open’ SMTP / RFC 822 style email there’s not a lot you can do – there’s no ‘time to read’ parameter, and even if there was there’s no guarantee that a client would obey it.

Third party systems are available (e.g. http://www.grpsoft.com/gss/product_ml.html), but that’s obviously only suitable for email between a few trusted parties, rather than something like a B2C campaign.

By: Tim Danton

Tim Danton — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:42:02 +0000

You’re quite right… so does anyone know the answer?

By: Paul Ockenden

Paul Ockenden — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:34:44 +0000

That’s what I thought, too.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:49:54 +0000

I think you’ve missed the point – your emailer wants them to self destruct on the other persons PC not on his own PC!