Self-destructing emails? Or just 'best before'?
L33tdawg: Wow -- what a useful tool. Now you could send a trojan via e-mail and have the e-mail deleted once the trojan's installed and voila` no more traces! Or what about aiding spammers? That being said though, tools of this sort have been around for sometime, but TOUTING it is something else all together.
One of the more high-profile additions to Microsoft's Office software – Outlook with emails that 'self-delete' after a set time to keep senders from electronic slip-ups – may not be quite the security revolution it's been talked up to be. A Microsoft spokeswoman told silicon.com that, rather than removing itself from the recipient's inbox entirely or self-destructing, an email that has been "timestamped" using the new function will remain, clearly visible, in the recipient's inbox. However, without being granted new rights from the sender, the recipient still won't be able to open it.
silicon.com readers were unimpressed with the unique and novel tool, not fancying it to be hugely novel or that unique. Reader Graham Silversides highlighted that a similar tool was already at work in other Windows software: "This feature is already available in Outlook XP. From within a new email message in the Options box there is a tick box called 'Expires after:', where you can set the date and time for the message to 'expire' or disappear. I have tried this and it works."
