Re: Email expiration?

["Jim Halfpenny" <jim () openanswers co uk>]

>       Hi,
>
>       There's any way to 'auto-destroy' na email sent after N days?
>
>       I'd like to send an email to someone and after N days the email
> became unreadeble. Is that possible? I thougth about a certificate that
> expires. Will that work? Does something like that exists?
>
> Thanks alot.
> Thiago Lima.

This is pretty much impossible I'm afraid. One way to achieve somehting
like this would be to send an HTML email with the message content being
held in an image on a web server. This would mean that the content would
be available for as long as you left it on the web server. You could even
digitally sign the email and the sig won't change when you remove/alter
the image file.

Please bear in mind there is nothing to stop the reader from making a copy
of the message before the expiration date. You're sending the message to
an untrusted client so you cannot have any confidence that said client
will not cache, copy or otherwise reproduce the message. If the reader can
read the message once they can make a copy of it.

Regards,
Jim Halfpenny