Re: Scope for self-destructing email?

[Matthias Merkel <[e-mail]>]

I think however that this system would mostly find use in systems like governments or maybe communication between whistleblowers and news outlets. In these cases you can trust the receipient server to delete the message when being told to do so.

On Aug 14, 2017 9:40 PM, Matthew Pounsett <[e-mail]> wrote:

On 14 August 2017 at 15:24, Matthias Merkel <[e-mail]> wrote:

How about adding a way to tell if a SMTP server supports self-destructing emails and if it doesn't tell the user it doesn't and if they want to send it without self destruction

You have the same enforceability problem.   In the first case the request is basically, "you MUST delete this message on the date requested, but if you don't you MUST send a notice saying you didn't do that, but if you don't... nothing happens."   Just as nothing stops the receiving server from never deleting the message and never telling you, there's nom way to force the receiving server to tell you the truth about what features it implements.

As a simple advisory feature I'd probably ignore it.  Since there's never any way to know whether the receiving server will live up to its promise, you can never trust that it will, and so why send the info in the first place?