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Gmail's 'Self-Destruct' Feature Will Probably Be Used To Illegally Destroy Government Records (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new update rolling out for Gmail offers a "self destruct" feature that allows users to send messages that expire after a set amount of time. While this may sound great for personal use, activists fear that government organizations will use the feature to delete public records to hide them from reporters and others interested in government transparency. Normally, government emails are available to journalists, researchers, and citizens using Freedom of Information Act requests (and its state-level analogues.) The self destruct feature was announced on April 25 as part of Google's new confidential mode for G Suite. In addition to self destruct, confidential mode allows users to delete messages after they have been sent and places restrictions on how recipients can interact with received emails. "As more local and state governments and their various agencies seek to use Gmail, there is the potential that state public records laws will be circumvented by emails that 'disappear' after a period of time," the National Freedom of Information Coalition wrote in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "The public's fundamental right to transparency and openness by their governments will be compromised. We urge you take steps to assure the 'self-destruct' feature be disabled on government Gmail accounts and on emails directed to a government entity."
I have not used Outlook for a few years, but even then automatic email deletions were standard.
So far as the unrelated topic of deleting a sent email, yes Outlook has this ability.
It needs to be enabled, but in a company a group policy can both enable it and lock the setting so the user can't disable it.
By default without that, you get a deletion request and need to respond 'yes' before it deletes the email.
Gmails feature doesn't do anything like that, mainly because if the email leaves googles servers, they have zero control over it and beyond a similar "honor system" method, it's just not possible to do this using email protocols.
This is more like how Snapchat handles pictures with auto-destruct.
Google takes your email and stores it, then sends the recipient an email, not with your message content, but with a URL back to google.
Opening that URL then uses javascript to show an image with your message contents (to make copy/paste a pain), refuses to show the image without javascript (to make script blockers a pain), and deletes the message once viewed or after a certain time.
They probably also employ all the other silly javascript tricks to try and make it as hard as possible to store the image out of the browser, not that those were ever fully functional.
It doesn't take much to get a screen shot by someone who knows what they are doing, but it will stop the vast majority of i-have-zero-clue-computers-are-magic users that make up over 99% of the Internet.