Can you send email that "self-distructs?"

Factual Questions
1

You know, ala mission impossible? Can you send an email that is erased from someone’s hard drive after a certain period of time without sending them some nasty virus?

2

I don’t think so; I don’t recall any type of expiry or auto-deletion header that is native to the standard email formats.

It would have to be an executable attachment, which, even if it didn’t self-replicate, would be viewed by most people as equivalent to a virus (from the security viewpoint, at least)

3

You could email a url of a web page - perhaps you can have it disappear after it was viewed once

4

yes, you can.

http://www.disappearing.com/

another interesting site is http://www.safemessage.com/

5

and here’s another site : https://www.ziplip.com/

but here’s an interesting article, that’ll probably answer some more questions on this topic…haven’t had the time to browse thru it but it does look interesting and points out some flaws in these systems…

http://www.kenwithers.com/articles/email.html

6

Thanks Xash,
I can’t believe companies like “Disappearing Inc” and “ZipLip” would use these names for a corporation marketing to large corporations. Someone needs to get these people a marketing group. What company wants it known to others that they use such shady sounding email devices??

7

Disappearing, Inc. is now known as Omniva Policy Systems, probably for exactly that reason.

To answer the OP, I don’t think this is possible in general. The systems I’ve reviewed use an “enterprise mail system” where the mail is held on the server and viewed but not stored locally by the client. That allows the server to enforce a deletion policy set by the sender or admin. However, this can easily be subverted by saving the file locally with a cut-and-paste or screenshot. Also, it doesn’t work at all if you send mail to someone outside the system. AFAIK, there is no way to make the average user’s email client delete anything after the fact.

There are lots of systems that purport to offer both expiry functionality and/or more general access and copy protection. These fall under the general header of DRM (digital rights management). In every case that’s been open to thorough review, it’s been shown to be fairly easy to crack the algorithm or subvert the protocol. The only thing that will make these things work as advertised is if the DMCA is allowed to muzzle the publication of critical review.

8

i’ll second what micco says. it’s relatively easy to find a work around for most of these systems. so, while such systems exist, they are nowhere near perfect.