Self-Shredding E-Mail

yoink! writes: "I just read an article on CNN.com describing a self-shredding e-mail system. With all the persistent e-mail documents gathered by the Government in the MS Anti-Trust case, and the massive shredding of paper documents by parties in the Enron fiasco, it's no wonder people have been looking for an electronic solution to a material problem solved years ago with some cutting tools, a motor, and a garbage bag." One of the companies highlighted here was called Disappearing, Inc. when it was mentioned a few years ago, but now several others have joined the fray.

Comments

Re:Common sense?

[sql*kitten]

How bout not sending anything that could get you in trouble? Common sense should prevail here. But in the wake on Enron, I am sure they will do well.

There's a scene in Cryptonomicon in which Avi (I think) explains that important discussions have to take place between only two people at a time, so there is plausible deniability and nothing to subpoena.

This is why, even when email, videoconferencing and even faxes are widespread, nothing will ever replace face to face meetings for serious business.

Re:PGP can be a substitute

[CatherineCornelius]

When encrypting a message with PGP you can use the -m option (or sellect the 'secure viewer' if you are using one of the windoze versions)

Doing this prevents the recipiant from saving a plain text version on their disks

I hope nobody reading this will rely on "pgp -m" for security--it's just a convenience that tries to ensure that your recipient doesn't do something insecure such as saving plaintext to disk, but if he wants to he can probably still do that with a couple of keypresses.

we had this years ago

[jd142]

Back in the distant mists of time, when we had cc:mail in house, messages were deleted from the server after 15 days. Since it was not pop3 and all messages were kept right on the server instead of downloaded to your hard drive, it meant that after 15 days it was gone for good. In theory, backups were made. But the person in charge of cc:mail and the backups had . . . issues with the backup, so itwas hit and miss anyway.

If people wanted to keep a message, they did what every one using these e-mail shredders will do: either print it directly or copy and paste it into word and print it from there.