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

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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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[–] ferric_carcinization@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago

I'd still say that it's better.

With "delete after reading", the recipient has to delete the email manually, so the email is kept if no action is taken. But with the methods listed in the post, the content disappears unless action is taken to save it in some form.

Yes, the content can be easily saved & you should never trust that no clients are malicious, but people are forgetful & lazy. If you need the recipient to perform an action each time, there's a good chance that they won't.

I still understand your point. You can't get around the analog gap unless you transmit everything directly ro the brain. And even if you could do that, with text, it's easy to reproduce from memory.