Have you ever regretted sending an email, and wished you could take it back? Or maybe
you’ve worried about sending confidential information over email – especially after seeing
the damage a large-scale email hack can cause, like the one that hit Sony Pictures last
year? A new “self-destructing” email service called Dmail aims to eliminate these concerns
with the introduction of tool that allows you to better control the messages that are sent
over Gmail.
With Dmail, you can revoke access to any email at any time, and, in a release arriving
soon, you’ll be able to stop recipients from forwarding your message to others, too.
The idea for the new service comes from the team behind the social bookmarking service
Delicious . A longtime web staple, Delicious was sold by its former owners, YouTube co-
founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, to the tech investment and advisory firm Science,
Inc ., run by former MySpace President Mike Jones.
Along with Delicious, Science invests a number of growing startups, like FameBit and
Hello Society, through its Science Media Group arm, and incubates and invests in others
like DogVacay, HomeHero, Dollar Shave Club and more.
How Dmail Works
Of course, the ability to revoke an email has been around for some time – but those earlier
implementations leave a lot to be desired. For example, Microsoft Outlook users at a
company that uses Exchange Server can recall emails , but it doesn’t work with addresses
outside the organization. Meanwhile, Gmail’s own “un-send” feature – which recently
graduated from Gmail Labs – lets you cancel a sent email by configuring the number of
seconds after hitting “Send” that you can click on an “Undo Send” link to bring your
message back to drafts.
However, Gmail’s undo send option is limited to 30 seconds max. With Dmail, you can
destroy a sent email at any time.
The product works by way of a Google Chrome web browser extension , which only you, as
the email sender, have to install.

Once loaded, you’ll have a new option within the Gmail “compose” interface that allows
you to turn the Dmail service off and on using a toggle switch. When on, you can specify
ahead of sending an email if you want the email destroyed in an hour, a day, a week, or
“never.” Even if you choose the “never” option, you can later go into your sent message
and click a “Revoke Email” button to remove access to that email from all recipients.
What’s clever about Dmail is that, unlike some other secure messaging products, recipients
don’t have to use the service themselves in order for it to work. If they don’t have the
extension installed, they’ll instead receive an email that states: “ This secure message was
sent using Dmail. To view this message, simply click the button below.”
Clicking the included “View Message” button will then redirect them to a web view where
they can read your email.
If, however, they do have the extension installed, they can read your message right within
Gmail itself.
In addition, after a sender revokes an email, recipients with the extension installed will see
a message that reads: “this message has been destroyed and is no longer available.”
Those without the extension can still go into the email and click on the “View Message”
button, but they’ll then see a similar “Message Unavailable” note on the resulting webview.
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Dmails are encrypted using a standard 256-bit encryption algorithm, the company
says. When a user sends a Dmail, the body of that email is encrypted locally on the user’s
machine, explains Eric Kuhn, who lead product on Dmail. “An encrypted copy of that email
is sent to a datastore controlled by Dmail. The recipient of the email is sent both the
location of that datastore, as well as a key to view the decrypted message,” he says.
“Neither Gmail nor Dmail servers ever receive both the decryption key and encrypted
message. Only the recipient and sender can read the email legibly,” Kuhn adds.
The product, which was built by a seven-person subset of Delicious’s team, has been in
development for a good part of the year, and has been in private testing, first internally
with Delicious and then with Delicious users, over the past few months.
While it currently only works with Gmail, the long-term goal is to expand access to other
platforms, including Google Apps. In addition, a Dmail iOS application will launch in
August, and will be followed by an Android release. These apps will allow users to both
compose and read Dmails right from their smartphone.

From a scientific perspective, I don't see how it works. You can't really take back what you send because once you send it over the internet it's there forever.

Also, all email is pretty much encrypted today (gmail, yahoo, Microsoft (hotmail, live, outlook), etc.

Fulaman198:
From a scientific perspective, I don't see how it works. You can't really take back what you send because once you send it over the internet it's there forever.

Also, all email is pretty much encrypted today (gmail, yahoo, Microsoft (hotmail, live, outlook), etc.

With Dmail, you can
destroy a sent email at any time.
The product works by way of a Google Chrome web browser extension , which only you,
as
the email sender, have to install.
Once loaded, you’ll have a new option within the Gmail “compose” interface that allows
you to turn the Dmail service off and on using a toggle switch. When on, you can specify
ahead of sending an email if you want the email destroyed in an hour, a day, a week, or
“never.” Even if you choose the “never” option, you can later go into your sent message
and click a “Revoke Email” button to remove access to that email from all recipients.
What’s clever about Dmail is that, unlike some other secure messaging products, recipients
don’t have to use the service themselves in order for it to work. If they don’t have the
extension installed, they’ll instead receive an email that states: “ This secure message was
sent using Dmail. To view this message, simply click the button below.”
Clicking the included “View Message” button will then redirect them to a web view where
they can read your email.