Self-Destructing Email

Ritu Raj
2 min readJan 27, 2013

Imagine messaging in Mission Impossible be a reality for email. "If you choose to accept this mission . . . this message self-destruct in 5 min"

Email with Time

The next evolution of Email systems need to have the ability to declare time.

Instead of sending an email to someone you can opt to enter - please respond by date/time. This would enhance coordination and productivity. It will give an option of sorting emails by the time response is due.

In the world of always on and connected - having Messaging coupled with Time - would help auto prioritize the things that we have to do.

Informational emails in Corporate America with a date/time will self-delete, invitations of having a pizza party in the conference room will self-delete at 2pm.

I get 200 emails a day and delete 150 emails. These emails are not spam, some of them informational, or offers that I want to see. If they were time bound self-delete emails, it would save me the time specially on days when I really don’t have the time to look at them.

New rules make all email marketeers put a date/time on their email - like a limited time offer and then the email gets automatically get deleted.

There could be an option on emails with self-delete, with one click you can keep them, to read later.

Email Systems

Integrating Email with Time needs to be taken on at the email system level. Emails would need to have a time management server attached to it, which is not really difficult to do with Exchange or Gmail. What it would take would be one large email system giant like Microsoft or Google, adding the meta Time information to the email construct, and that would set the standard in time.

Maybe this is futuristic - but email systems have to evolve, they are in a status quo since invented as a basic messaging platform.

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Ritu Raj

Ritu Raj VP Corp Dev @DiamondFoundry. Founder @BeingHappy @Objectiveli, @WagHotels and Avasta, EIR at SpringVC (@sidecar), Partner @Accenture, VP TMP worldwide