Gmail Messages Can Now Self-Destruct

New submitter Amarjeet Singh writes: Dmail is a Chrome extension developed by the people behind Delicious, the social bookmarking app/extension. This extension allows you to set a self-destruct timer on your emails. You can use Dmail to send emails from Gmail as usual, but you will now have a button which can set an self destruct timer of an hour, a day or a week. Dmail claims it will also unlock a feature that won't allow forwarding, meaning only the person you sent your message to will be able to see it.

Comments

Won't allow forwarding?

[elgholm]

Please explain.

Re:Won't allow forwarding?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Really. Is there some hidden API into gmail? And receiver can do whatever it wants with the email, includ8ng forward, via cut and paste if necessary, assuming bizarre behavior from gmail.

And what of gmail's safety backups? How long before gmail clobbers those?

Re:Won't allow forwarding?

[just another AC]

If the end content needs to be presented to a human at any point, it can be copied. It is just a case of time, effort and quality. No matter how much they lock down the operating system, we can take a photo of the monitor. MS knows this, I don't expect them to push that hard for it.

Until they start connecting directly into our brains (with channel only being unencrypted "in-brain"), DRM is nothing but an inconvenience.

Pure undulterated bullshit

[cheesybagel]

BS.

"it will also unlock a feature that won’t allow forwarding, meaning only the person you sent your message to will be able to see it"

Then I'll copy and paste the text to another Windows and foward it.

What the article describes is not e-mail. It's an messaging app with a different protocol using e-mail only as a transport mechanism.

LOL! Is the email content just stored elsewhere?!

[Anonymous Coward]

OH LOL!

Look at the screenshot in the second article!

Look at it!

OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL!

If this works like I think it works, then the email the recipient gets only has this "View Message" link in it? And then the recipient must maybe view the actual content of the email, which I presume is stored on some other server somewhere? And that's how access to it is limited?

OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL!

Can anyone confirm this? Does this just send an email to the recipient, linking to the actual content which is stored somewhere else, on a web server somewhere I would presume? Maybe even somewhere in THE CLOUD?

Can anyone confirm this is what is happening in this case? Anyone?

OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL! OH LOL!

Won't/can't work

[Todd Knarr]

Their extension can't affect the recipient's end of things if the recipient isn't also running that extension. In that case nothing Dmail can do can prevent the recipient from saving the message, forwarding it or doing anything else with it. Dmail can play tricks with HTML e-mail by replacing the body of the e-mail with a dummy wrapper that fetches the message via HTTP from a Dmail server and they can use some Javascript tricks to try and block "Save as", but those are going to run into problems with anything that blocks remote content or disables Javascript in e-mail. Even if the recipient's using Gmail in Chrome that's going to be an issue considering how that sort of blocking's basic to blocking malware. And of course if the recipient's running a non-browser client using IMAP4, Dmail's completely out of luck.

As far as being able to restrict viewing to only the recipient, that's easy. Every standard mail client today supports it. The hard bit's getting the recipient to generate a public-key certificate and install it as a personal certificate and key in their e-mail client. Then you just encrypt the e-mail using their public key and send it as an S/MIME message, their mail client will automatically decrypt it for them. I could even make that work in web-mail with a browser extension that recognizes the message text block, grabs it and decrypts it and stuffs the results back in the text block for the user to see. The obvious advantages here are that a) you wouldn't need to use any particular service provider to send the mail and b) not even the service provider or e-mail servers would be able to see the cleartext. The hard part's the PKI, and really all that needs is an extension for the mail client to automate generation of a certificate and installation into the client like we have in browsers. Depending on the browser and OS that might be simplified by taking advantage of shared OS cryptography features.

I've kicked this idea around as a commercial possibility, but it all comes down to two basic problems:

• If the messages are truly private it's nigh impossible to generate revenue by any means except annual subscriptions from users. Senders might pay, but recipients won't and that breaks the whole thing.
• Controlling what happens after the message reaches the recipient's nigh-impossible. The best you can do is if you restrict recipients to a platform like mobile where they have to access messages through your app. There's still ways around the controls, but you can make it so the phone has to be rooted and then access to the secure credential storage obtained and that's not something that can be automated enough to be feasible for the average user to do. In an uncontrolled environment like a browser or a regular e-mail client? Forget it.

Corporate applications?

[Mr. Freeman]

Will this work for people sending messages to other random people? Probably not. But imagine a corporation deploying this system to all of their computers. Suddenly, the boss can tell their employees to do unethical things, make illegal threats, and so on without any chance that the FBI is suddenly going to show up and arrest him with evidence of his misdeeds.

Re:Just delete it

[AJWM]

This. Links in email are dead to me. I don't follow them, my mail client doesn't follow them, it's just so many wasted bytes. And that includes e-cards from friends/relatives. You want to send me something, send it to me, don't ask a third-party to.

(Sure, I make an exception for links I'm expecting (have asked for) but even then I'll copy them to my browser. HTML in my email is turned off.)