Comments | area69: Ever want an UNSEND feature in e-mail?

area69

Ever want an UNSEND feature in e-mail?

Sep 27, 2004 20:37

Have you ever sent an e-mail that you really shouldn't have? Get on a drunken bender and send pictures of your ex-girlfriend having sex with your best friend only to realize that you're legally liable for sharing their intimate moments without their consent. Legally liable for $500,000 per picture, per property holder? And you just sent sixteen ( Read more... )

Comments 12

djenigma September 27 2004, 19:54:17 UTC

i don't know why they don't have this feature already widely available (it's available on intranet email systems running ms exchange)... every email you send has a unique id associated with it.. so it's simply be a matter of sending a request to the recipient's mail server looking for the message id in question, and marking it "unsent". the biggest problem i see is authenticating the "unsend" requests.. just like sending an email in the first place, with the way email systems are currently designed, this would be entirely too easy to spoof.

area69 September 27 2004, 20:05:07 UTC

Wasn't the Exchange feature designed for appending information to messages? I believe that Lotus Notes also had a similar feature for their Intranet product back in the day.

djenigma September 27 2004, 20:08:03 UTC

they may have one for appending/modifying messages too, but the one i'm thinking of is specifically for unsending (i believe they call it "recalling") a message.

lillykat September 27 2004, 21:17:43 UTC

Finally I can send anonymous e-mails to my parents and then unsend. This will wonder who keeps stalking them, or at least annoying. I shall have my revenge *cackles*

malaryush September 28 2004, 04:31:28 UTC

Outlook already had this function. I have co-workers who use this function like it's their job. I get at least one "recalled" e-mail a week.

thedexter September 28 2004, 09:02:26 UTC

then, folks will just start reading their emails, saving them locally, and marking them as "unread."

area69 September 28 2004, 10:31:05 UTC

Yup. That's one of the major problems with the way mail servers currently operate. They would have to have a "read but marked as unread" flag so that there weren't a whole lot of false positives showing up on Judge Judy.

incompatible September 28 2004, 19:39:46 UTC

Here's to drunken emailing.

Word.

correnn September 29 2004, 07:16:45 UTC

That's whats needed: a breathalizer that locks your email so you can't do anything until you're under the leagal limit.

Of course we need a perma-lock on people that are just plain stupid.