Email messages never disappear, could be longlive liability

Email messages never disappear, could be longlive liability

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): Are you haunted by some of the things you have
said in an email over the years? Ever have that awful feeling of
regret? You know you have been caught, and you wish, wish to God,
that you could turn back the clock and make that one thing you
did, said or wrote just go away. Maybe it was misspelling your
name on a resume, or a tongue-in-cheek email you sent.

Emails never really die. People like Monica Lewinsky, Bill
Gates and Oliver North are celebrities who have learned the hard
way that a message long thought deleted can be found on the
network and later be used against its author. It is more of a
danger than people realize.

Perhaps you have heard the story about NASA spending millions
of dollars to develop a pen that can write in zero gravity, but I
am not sure whether this pen can be used in normal gravity. A
U.S. company called Disappearing, Inc. has a new piece of
software that could change all that. It is like a new pen
software equipped with "disappearing" ink, which makes your email
unreadable after a specified period of time.

Disappearing Email is an email delivery system that allows
users to send encrypted messages across the Internet, which can
only be read for a specific length of time. After the time period
has elapsed, the encryption key, necessary for reading the
message, is deleted from the Disappearing Email Server, rendering
the message unreadable and therefore worthless.

Disappearing Email works with Microsoft Outlook 98 or Outlook
2000 running on Windows 95, Windows 98 or NT. Outlook Express is
a completely different product.

Disappearing Email does not support Outlook Express, but any
email client software (Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.) can read
Disappearing Email messages.

When you download the free edition Disappearing Email for
Microsoft Outlook plug-in (about 350KB) from Disappearing's Web
site (www.disappearing.com), it is automatically installed and a
"Send Disappearing" icon appears on the Outlook toolbar. You use
Outlook in the normal way to compose messages. If you want to set
a time limit on the message, click on the Send Disappearing icon.
The plug-in encrypts your messages using the 128-bit Blowfish
algorithm. It accesses Disappearing's key server through a secure
link, assigns a unique decryption key, and sends the message on
its way.

On the receiving end, the email server is once again contacted
for the necessary key, and the message is then decoded and
displayed to the viewer.

For recipients that are not running Outlook, the email viewer
allows them to view Disappearing encoded messages within their
browser. But after the time limit specified by the sender, the
decryption key is erased from Disappearing's key server, making
the message unreadable and effectively destroying it, even if the
recipient stores it.

Users of Disappearing Email for Microsoft Outlook can specify
shorter or longer time periods for the message to expire,
starting as short as 30 minutes. The simplicity of the system is
underscored on the receiving side. The recipient does not need a
plug-in or any special software to read your message. Any mail
client that handles HTML, including all major email programs and
browser-based emails, such as Hotmail or Yahoo, can read your
mail.

What happens when someone replies to or forwards a
Disappearing Email? When you send a reply, a forwarded or
redirected message a second key is generated, and both keys are
needed to read the reply. So when the original message expires,
you can be certain that any replies or forwarded copies are also
permanently unreadable. You can, if you wish, send a reply or
forward the email that is set to expire before the original
message, but because the original sender's expiration setting is
always honored, you cannot extend the life of the conversation by
setting a later expiration.

There are some minor glitches that you must be aware of in
Disappearing Email's known issue. First, it may not work
correctly if your Internet connection is using a proxy server or
firewalls that perform http validation. Second, when Word is set
as the email editor in Microsoft Outlook, you cannot send
Disappearing Email. Finally, HTML and rich text message
formatting cannot be preserved inside the Disappearing Email
message.

With email, we sometimes use language very loosely, but it
should be understood that we should not use this "disappearing"
email technology illegally or to hurt someone's feelings by
sending misleading information or bad words. The point is,
because we are making this powerful technology so publicly
available we need to protect the community and ourselves from any
abuse. As new technology comes into being, it is up to everyone
to manage how they are applied so that everyone can benefit.

After you read this article, you will be able to breathe
easier in the knowledge that your hasty email's thoughts will not
come back to haunt you at some far distant point in the future
after using the new products from Disappearing, Inc.