Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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methods to send self destructing emails (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 5 days ago by smq@discuss.tchncs.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey Lemmy!

Exactly as the title says, where self-destructing means that no matter what email provider I, or my recipients use, the email will be gone after a set amount of time.

The methods I have come up with are:

using a PrivateBin or PasteBin link.
- requires the recipient to click on a link that opens in another app/tab
- easy to set up
using an HTML remote content stylesheet with CSS ::after to inject the body text of the email; then, if I control the server, I can delete the stylesheet and the email will be gone.
- embedded in the email, but plain text only. I'm not even sure if it can do line breaks.
loading an SVG from a remote source

Does anyone have more methods?

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 17 points 5 days ago (1 children)

"Self-destructing" is like fetch: it isn't gonna happen. Stop trying to make self-destructing happen!

(No, seriously: the ability to enforce self-destruction of a message on a computer implies a pervasive Hellscape of DRM. You really don't actually want that.)

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

I agree it's not possible with an uncooperative/adversarial recipient, but it's very possible that the recipient is cooperative, but too passive to reliably follow an instruction like "delete after reading".

It may be reasonable to use technical means to protect certain messages against the possibility that the recipient's computer or mail provider will be stolen or compromised in the future. Email isn't a great tool for this.