Self-destructing E-mail
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When the increasingly unpopular Mr Cruise eventually comes around to making MI 4, his character is bound to get his next task via a Blackberry. The e-mail would then read:
“Good morning, Mr. Hunt. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves … yadi yada …. This e-mail would self-destruct in five seconds.”
The next version of MS Outlook is supposed to have a feature whereby e-mail you sent to people can be configured to expire after a specified period. (A feature called Information Rights Management is available on Outlook 2003 but it’ll work only if the recipient is also using MS Outlook and is not fool-proof.) The software will also allow you to prevent the e-mail from being printed or forwarded. Today there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about other (currently available) services that provide similar “security” features. One such service is Kablooey Mail. The service is still in Beta but promises a few other features for e-mailing apart from the timed expiration. As e-mail becomes more and more admissible in judicial cases, these features will become more valuable.
If the email was ever written on disk, it doesn’t matter what Outlook does with it. It can be recovered, even after Outlook fully deletes it. As usual, Outlook will give its users a false sense of security…
The idea actually is pretty neat. However these features have nothing to do with the security of it. The security falls in the authentication and integrity preserving mechanism (if one could call it such) implemented by the mail software, in which the protocol is part of it.
Somethings can be done reasonably well. However, if history has shown us something is MS poor implementation when it comes to security, and much more on their oiutlook implementation.
Mother dies of shock after delivering 7th daughter
Read:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1992639.cms
A wee bit off topic, rajesh, but since we here at rantlust pride ourselves in the art of the smooth segue-way; poor Kadambini can rest in peace, safe in the knowledge that she will be the mother of all nations a few millenia from today (with a high degree of probability).