In article <CACZ1GipivEf31iHchaM1OPFQF4QkfVRGVNsY_vVx=J8oFZ0JZA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> you write: >With regards to this, me and my friends were thinking about the idea of a >self-destructing email, wherein the sender will mark the mail to be >destroyed (expunged from the server) once the receiver(s) have finished >reading it/after a time period chosen by the sender. This can never work, for both technical and policy reasons. The technical reason, as others have explained, is that recipient systems can do anything they want with mail they receieve. If I got mail with a "must delete" flag I would probably reply that it's been deleted and then archive it forever. (I live in the United States, where that is quite legal.) The other is that there are organizations that for good policy reasons archive all of their incoming and outgoing mail, such as banks and other financial institutions. Imagine if you sent a message to your broker saying "sell all of my stocks" with the delete flag. Whether or not a broker would act on it, no broker I know would delete it. R's, John