E-mail Innovator Pitches Self-Deleting E-Mails

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Now here is a pretty good idea, self deleting e-mail! This could come in handy for some of you guys. ;)

E-mails could use the "x-expires" header to tell the receiving in-box that they become outdated after a certain absolute date, or a certain time relative to when they're sent or received. Baer says this idea has been "bouncing around" for 10 years, but he's learned, "the best way to get a standard adopted is to work with individual companies first, and make it a de facto standard." That's what he's trying to do here.
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so what would stop me from forwarding the email to myself sans x-pire thus circumventing this idea.
Nice idea but full of fail
 
Horrible idea IMO... emails are nice because they're a trail left that you can file away, or you can delete yourself. The person sending you the email has lost all power over what you do with it once he hits send.
 
This would be great for sales flyers and promotional material.
 
Self-deleting e-mail, aka malware :)

It deletes stuff for you automatically.
 
Later you will start getting emails with header: you got 10 seconds to read this email before your wife dies.
 
The Gonz said:
so what would stop me from forwarding the email to myself sans x-pire thus circumventing this idea.
Nice idea but full of fail
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As far as I can tell, the point of the flag is not to protect senders from archiving receivers anyway. (After all, email clients could easily just allow the user to configure whether they want to respect the expiration date or not.) Instead, I think the idea is simply meant to offer convenience to receivers who find their inbox cluttered with thousands of old, irrelevant emails, but who don't want to sort the wheat from the chaff themselves. I wouldn't use it myself, since I'd rather determine relevance myself than let the sender do it, but...maybe some people would like this?
 
I wouldn't like it. For one thing I archive my emails and have frequently gone back years for information they contain. Also, what about Sarbanes Oxley or HIPAA regulations on retenntion for archival? What if someone sends a sexually harrasing valentine in your work email? You're going to need that email to deal with the problem.

Yes I know you could make it an opt in kind of thing but we all know that in a short period of time it won't be used by most people. It's got to be an all or nothing thing for people to use it and email retention like everything else is not black and white.
 
I'm guilty of not cleaning out my inbox, but I don't like this concept. It should be at the user's discretion, and it's the user's responsibility to manage their own mail.
 
hawk82 said:
Self-deleting e-mail, aka malware :)

It deletes stuff for you automatically.
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Indeed, things that do things without your permission...

To be brief: no, thank you, email has enough security holes without this weaponized.
 
jwalk6 said:
I wouldn't like it. For one thing I archive my emails and have frequently gone back years for information they contain. Also, what about Sarbanes Oxley or HIPAA regulations on retenntion for archival? What if someone sends a sexually harrasing valentine in your work email? You're going to need that email to deal with the problem.

Yes I know you could make it an opt in kind of thing but we all know that in a short period of time it won't be used by most people. It's got to be an all or nothing thing for people to use it and email retention like everything else is not black and white.
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All i know is that our Email Archival system for SOX/PCI would nullify any self deleting emails. This guys method couldnt ever have a place in the business world IMO.
 
meh. I filter marketing emails into a seperate label in my gmail account. Excepting amazon it appears all the mails from 05/06 are already effectively dead already because the companies are no longer hosting the images that held all the content.
 
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