Gmail "confidential mode" and Fastmail
 

Google has introduced a so called confidential mode to their email which supposedly allows an expiration date to be set on the email as well as preventing forwarding, copying, printing and downloading as explained here. They do this by sending you a link to the message instead of the actual message.

https://www.computerworld.com/articl...tial-mode.html

Well in my opinion, #@#$ that. I never used custom sieve code before, but this seems to do the job. I put it between sections 5 and 6 of the code shown when you click to edit the custom code.


if exists "X-Gm-Locker"
{reject "Google confidential mode emails are automatically deleted at this email address."; }

FastMail allows you to automatically purge emails in a folder that are older than a set threshold. I t is a mystery to me how you would support the other restrictions and still allow standard email clients to be used. I have a suspicion that this may be an effort to lock Google's customers into only using Google's own products, and making any future migration to another service more difficult.

Yes, but that is the receiver expiring out the message. Gmail's idea is to allow the sender to expire the message. They do that by sending only a link to the message, which is kept on their servers, and then the link doesn't work any more after the expiry period is over. I've tried it, and it works OK, but certainly does not excite me. I want my email store to provide a memory and an audit trail of what I have been sent (and what I have sent). One can work around the expiry anyway by capturing the results of the link, as long as you do it before it expires.

Maybe we all should set an expiration date on our emails--would keep everyone's Inboxes clean! Just kidding. Like some others, I am not certain this "feature" is a good idea. I'm thinking that spammers and phishers will love it because evidence of their crimes will disappear eventually. I have been personally threatened by someone, and I can imagine folks like that will love this feature.

Yes I was on an email server like that years ago...... But you could still press PRINT SCREEN and then send the picture to someone......