A story on BBC
News describes new functionality to be included in the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2003
which would allow senders of email messages to set ‘expiry times’ (after which the message would be automatically deleted from the recipient’s inbox) and control
whether the recipient can print or forward the message to a third party.
Nice idea, but it won’t work.
The article reads: “Upgrades to Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program come
with a feature which gives you complete control over what people do with
messages or documents.” Not a chance – if I, as a recipient of a
‘protected’ message, am able to read the contents of a message, I can clearly do
what I like with the contents, technically at least, if not legally or
ethically. The only way to ‘restrict’ what I can do is if my email client is
suitably restricted (i.e. by using a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2003). What
possible reason would make me want to use such a deliberately ‘broken’ email
client? In typical marketing-speak, Microsoft describe products exhibiting this
‘broken’ behaviour as “Information Right Management (IRM) enabled”.
Microsoft obviously realise this problem, and so they have to make sure that
the ’email message’ which is sent cannot be read in a standard email
client, including existing copies of Outlook Express, for example. Each message
will be, in effect, encrypted and will only be readable by someone using
Microsoft Outlook 2003 on a network with a Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, or by
using a ‘free viewer’. Bet you this free viewer won’t be available for various, alternative operating systems. This is yet another example of
Microsoft attempting to lock-in users to its systems. They appear to have
achieved it with documents, particuarly Word and Excel, and now they’re trying
to do the same for email messages. We will have ‘Microsoft Email Messages (TM),
readable by Microsoft users’ rather than simply ’email messages readable by
all’. This is a Bad Thing for all email users.
Anyone sending me one of these ‘Microsoft email messages’ better expect a
request for it to be resent as a valid, email message adhering to the appropriate standards, as sent
by reputable email clients, such as pretty-much every email client except those
emanating from Redmond.
Further investigation shows that the ability to create IRM-enabled
messages is restricted to buyers of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition
(Standard Edition users can view, but not create such documents). Given
that a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition runs to more than 400
quid, this doesn’t sound like it’s great value.
Given Microsoft’s track record for security, maybe it won’t work very well,
anyway.
Update: Someone has posted this story on Slashdot. Some interesting and insightful comments, some not.