E-Mail Controls in Office 2003

TiggsPanther writes "The BBC's Technology News reports than the next version of MS Office will include E-Mail controls which should limit way that e-mail messages can be forwarded. Being tied into the Information Rights Management concept, it might be interesting to see how quickly this gets taken up."

Comments

Re:Only looking out for themselves with this

[Tim C]

But I assume that employees will still be able to print emails

Why do you assume that? Why do you assume that the print function will be enabled for protected emails or other documents?

Now, I grant you that no technological scheme can completely prevent information from being leaked - it can't stop me taking it down with paper and pen, or photographing the screen, etc, but it can at least make it difficult to do. Also, while the photogrpah would be harder to refute, my hand-written scrawl copy of an email could easily be dismissed as a forgery...

I can see this being very useful for companies and even some individuals, but essentially, there is no technological way of protecting data from redistribution by its intended recipient. It's not going to be as easy as just hitting print, though.

Re:Dialog Box

[Saxerman]

At first I thought this was a patch to prevent future email worms, but this is just more DRM management. Besides sounding like the Emperor's New Clothes, for this to work wouldn't your mail client have to query the recipient to make sure they're going to pay attention to whatever rules you apply to your forwarded mail? And, of course, query it in such a way that you can't get a spoofed reply forged to look like a legit MS approved mail client?

This sounds like that phone plan where you only get the discounted rates if you get all your friends to sign up with the same plan. Except in this case the rates aren't any cheaper.

Typical slimy behaviour

[swordgeek]

Look, can we put the DoJ onto this NOW, rather than after MS releases it? Clearly sending proprietary format email violates the MS anti-trust settlement, and if we get someone working on it now, we won't have to deal with this piece of shite.

There is nothing here--NOTHING--that can't be done with existing protocols. PGP anyone (or GPG if you prefer)? I seem to recall that it had a 'read-don't-save' flag that you could set.

Furthermore, this won't help anyways. Hasn't anyone heard of screencaptures?

This new "feature" has no purpose other than to lock people into MS Office even further. It's a political trojan horse.