9 years ago
5
Want your Gmail messages to self-destruct? There's a Chrome extension for that...
Dmail is a Chrome extension which allows you to un-send, or revoke any emails you send through your Gmail account. The service was launched by the same brainiacs that brought us the Delicious.
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I like the concept. I fully believe that in the future the ability to control the lifespan of messages you send will be a standard feature of all email / SMS type services. That being said, I won't be bothering with this application. Forcing everyone to click a link to go to an external site to view your messages is too cumbersome to use for daily communication. (And as the author mentions, seems phishy in nature). Plus you now have another vector of attack for security issues.
But, kudos to them for increasing awareness of the concept. Hopefully it will catch on and we'll see it integrated into more platforms.
So... Basically this same thing can be easily achieved, without a potentially nefarious middle-man and sans-browser extension, just by simply hosting a static page on an encrypted section of a website you host yourself.
Email link to said static page, delete said static page. Would be rather trivial to have it auto-delete after first view as well.
Exactly what I was thinking. Plus you could do additional analytics. See what IP addresses connect to the link. (Even restrict which IP addresses are allowed to view the page) Run jscript to log if the text is highlighted / copied. You could also counter that weakness by converting the text to a static image so it can't be copied as easily. You could get really into it, and generate a collection of individual pixel-pictures to generate your image, so that if someone did copy / paste the image they'd get a string of individual pixels. Of course they could still recover the image simply by getting the margins right and wrapping the pixels, but if you REALLY wanted to get deep into it, you could have various "nested" pixels that when viewed in your pre-set margins it creates your intended message with "background noise" pixels, but if you scroll the margins then your real message becomes the "noise" and you can have some other message appear once it hits on a different margin. This would give decent plausible deniability.
You should bottle that and sell it.. put these yahoos out of bidness.
This has the same issues as snapchat, only worse. It's trivial for someone to create an OCR program that will just take a screen shot and translate it. The analog hole will always defeat these sorts of things and are just giving folks a false sense of security.