Free self-destructing, expiring, and recallable email service to protect your privacy

Posted on July 24, 2007 at 4:23 pm

Ever write an email that you wish you could take back? Maybe you sent a job application with the wrong resume or sent an email to a co-worker when you were really angry? With most email services, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the recipient and you just have to hope that they can forgive you for your mistake.

However with so much communication relying on email and the fact that humans make mistakes all the time, it’s becoming important that email have some kind of control features so that you can do things such as expire a sensitive message after a certain amount of time, not allow forwarding or printing of emails, track an email through multiple senders, or simply recall an email due to an error.

There’s a new email service called BigString that has taken on this issue of privacy with full force. BigString is free, easy to use, and has a lot of cool features such as spam filtering, message sorting, video emails, large attachment capacity, and the features listed above. And for only $2.95 a month, you get 5GB of storage and POP3 access from any mail client! This may not be my main email program, but I can definitely see myself using this for over situations.

Once you create an account, you can compose new messages using the web interface and configure all the options there. When you send a email, there are 5 “types” that you can choose from: Recallable, Quick Destruct, Regular with Tracking, Regular, and Video mail. By default, every email is set to Recallable, which means that if you send an email, you can always go back later and have it self-destruct or expire!

Once you choose the type, on the tight hand side you’ll get a list of options such as how many views before the email expires or if you want to make it non-forwardable. I tried out the Quick Destruct and it worked fairly well. Basically, the way it seems to work is that your email message is actually sent as a picture and so the picture has to be downloaded to the recipients computer in order for them to view the message. So when the message “expires”, the image is simply removed from their servers! Smart!

And the cool thing is that you can see how many times an email has been viewed since the recipient has to download the image in order to view the message.

The only thing that remains in a person’s Inbox after you expire or erase an email is the subject line and the From address (your BigString account). The body and any attachments will be gone. This service is great for anyone who has to send emails to people they are not sure they can trust their message content with, i.e. online daters, photographers, copywriters, etc.

Try it out! Send your boss that hate message you always wanted to, then expire it so he doesn’t have any proof!