Expring Email Standard Proposed

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I have thousands and thousands of emails in my Gmail inbox, and many of these are subscriptions, spam, alerts, notices and low-priority messages that tend to pile up in the “unread” list. A proposal for expiring emails might help solve this.

OtherInbox CEO Joshua Baer has been proposing an additional header to email systems that would define when the message will expire. Messaging systems, for instance, can use an “x-expires” header to inform the server, receiving system or email client when the message is set to self-delete. This can be an absolute date and time, or a certain time after the message has been sent or received.

This can be useful for keeping email inboxes clean of expired coupons or offers. It can also be used to help minimize the leakage of important or confidential messages. At the very least, it can help clean up expired notices from your inbox.

While the concept does exist, and some services offer some form of self-deleting messages, there is currently no standard that will erase your message from all systems and servers at a set time. Baer says he’s trying to get corporate email users and webmail providers to adopt a standard. It does seem exciting to receive a confidential message and seeing it self-destruct after five seconds, right?

Image via flickr