Self Destructing Email?

Old concept, really nice execution…. and such an ample opportunity for abuse.

www.bigstring.com

“BigString Corporation has created a revolutionary new email service that allows users to control their sent email. The Company’s BigString product is an email service for both individuals and businesses that is recallable and changeable. With a patent pending technology, BigString allows a user to easily send, recall, erase, self-destruct and modify an email after it has been sent. BigString users have unprecedented control over all of their email, whether they choose to send it through the BigString.com website or an email client such as Outlook.

BigString’s emails look and feel like any other emails that you get, except that the sender has complete control over all of their email functions by clicking on the “Edit Sent Mail” button. Our unique “Edit Sent Mail” feature allows you to recall, erase, add or delete attachments and self-destruct your emails after they have been sent. BigString has filed a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office that covers the BigString software, methodology and business processes for recallable and erasable email.”

I’ll email myself, read it, and wait for it to self destruct…-or-…even better, change content completely. Sent myself an email…read it, closed it….I had set it to destruct in 10 minutes. Dang…freakin’ text disappeared before my eyes!

Gonna try the edit text function now. I could not manage to edit text once it had been delivered. Oh well…it did manage to delete well enough.

I was able to forward too, despite selecting “no forward” option. However, after deleting, forwarded msg was deleted too.

Opinion…cute as a novelty item, but I would not trust it to anything that may have legal ramifications. It’s an old, faulty method. The magic email links to remote images under the control of the mail service. The images are simply changed or deleted at the user-specified time. If your email client blocks remote images, all you will see is little red “X”‘s.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 6:12 am and is filed under technobabble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.