{"id":35,"date":"2003-10-21T15:00:32","date_gmt":"2003-10-21T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2003-10-21T15:00:32","modified_gmt":"2003-10-21T15:00:32","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Auto-destructing emails? I don’t think so …"},"content":{"rendered":"

A story on BBC
\nNews<\/a> describes new functionality to be included in the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2003<\/a>
\nwhich 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
\nwhether the recipient can print or forward the message to a third party.<\/p>\n

Nice idea, but it won’t work.<\/p>\n

The article reads: “Upgrades to Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program come
\nwith a feature which gives you complete control over what people do with
\nmessages or documents.”<\/i> Not a chance – if I, as a recipient of a
\n‘protected’ message, am able to read the contents of a message, I can clearly do
\nwhat I like with the contents, technically at least, if not legally or
\nethically. The only way to ‘restrict’ what I can do is if my email client is
\nsuitably restricted (i.e. by using a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2003). What
\npossible reason would make me want to use such a deliberately ‘broken’ email
\nclient? In typical marketing-speak, Microsoft describe products exhibiting this
\n‘broken’ behaviour as “Information Right Management (IRM) enabled”.<\/p>\n

Microsoft obviously realise this problem, and so they have to make sure that
\nthe ’email message’ which is sent cannot be read<\/i> in a standard email
\nclient, including existing copies of Outlook Express, for example. Each message
\nwill be, in effect, encrypted and will only be readable by someone using
\nMicrosoft Outlook 2003 on a network with a Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, or by
\nusing a ‘free viewer’. Bet you this free viewer won’t be available for various<\/a>, alternative<\/a> operating<\/a> systems<\/a>. This is yet another example of
\nMicrosoft attempting to lock-in users to its systems. They appear to have
\nachieved it with documents, particuarly Word and Excel, and now they’re trying
\nto do the same for email messages. We will have ‘Microsoft Email Messages (TM),
\nreadable by Microsoft users’ rather than simply ’email messages readable by
\nall’. This is a Bad Thing for all email users.<\/p>\n

Anyone sending me one of these ‘Microsoft email messages’ better expect a
\nrequest for it to be resent as a valid, email message adhering to the appropriate standards<\/a>, as sent
\nby reputable email clients, such as pretty-much every email client except those
\nemanating from Redmond<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Further investigation shows that the ability to create<\/i> IRM-enabled
\nmessages is restricted to buyers of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition
\n(Standard Edition users can view<\/i>, but not create such documents). Given
\nthat a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition runs to more than 400
\nquid, this doesn’t sound like it’s great value.<\/p>\n

Given Microsoft’s track record for security, maybe it won’t work very well,
\nanyway.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Someone has posted this story on Slashdot<\/a>. Some interesting and insightful comments, some not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…. (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}