[fec]

My weekend project: http://nofwd.com

I created this project because I was tired of seeing my friends violate the confidentiality of our private conversations, by constantly forwarding our emails to third parties. As you at HN will understand, 100% unbreakable rights management of digital content is physically impossible. That said, I think that this tool has great value, at least for people who face the same problem that I had.

Currently, you can use this tool manually, via the demo page, or you can integrate with your email client via the SMTP integration method. I'd like to find some way to streamline the setup process for the SMTP integration. Any ideas?

Other applications for this service:

- Use in addition to email disclaimers and confidentiality agreement footers at the bottom of emails.

- Watermark emails for tracking purposes.

- Supplement existing internal corporate policies for information disclosure.

- Provide additional auditing support for email access-control.

- Delete email messages after they have been sent.

Caveats:

- Currently detects all access attempts from the same computer as one single recipient. Likewise, accessing an email account from multiple devices will be detected as multiple recipients. I.e. each computer == one recipient.

- No real website design yet.

Stack:

Python / Tornado & adisp.py / Nginx / Nginx scripts / Redis / Postgresql

So HN, what do you think?

[daeken]

While I understand the motivation for this, I think it's actually a bad thing. Why? As you said, it's not perfect (and can't ever be), but when you create a service like this, people tend to use it in the way they see fit. If this got big, you'd have people actually using it to send emails that they think wouldn't be forwardable, when a simple copy and paste (at most) will defeat it.

It's a neat project, but it's snake oil that people will buy into. That's bad.

[Piskvorrr]

Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C. Voila plaintext (or in your case, a readable screenshot of the plaintext - I've been experimenting with the site meanwhile), let me forward that.

Moreover, I very much prefer my e-mail textual - some of my e-mail devices may be severely constrained in bandwidth and screen size; text compresses, transmits and scales way better (also: insert standard accessibility rant here).

Also, what of nomadic users? "Oh, your smartphone already accessed the one copy [for added fun, try "and didn't save it"]? No way to read the e-mail anywhere else, tough luck."

You have addressed the above as caveats - however, there one more thing that bothers me, immensely - the immediate, silent and complete retraction capability: "I never said that" is bad enough, "I never sent you an e-mail like that" would be worse. For dealing with certain people, I like to have a local copy of what was written, just in case they change their mind later. Even if I kept local copies of the screenshots, I like my evidence searchable, too - eyeballing a bunch of images to find a specific e-mail is distinctly suboptimal.

On the other hand, if you are facing the one exact problem of people mindlessly forwarding your e-mail, verbatim, this might be a useful mitigation technique. It's a nice project, but not useful for me - it would solve problems I don't have, while saddling me with other problems I don't want to have.

As for "no real website design" - I actually like the clean and minimal design :)

[wesley]

If you read the site, they convert it to an image. Usability for this sucks, no searching, no copying.

[mansr]

Nothing can stop someone simply saving the image and sending it as regular email. If it can be read, it can be copied. No point pretending otherwise.

[Edit: fix stray question mark.]

[drostie]

Well, you could pursue legal action under the DMCA for those sorts of actions in principle, but other than that, there is no need for a question mark on your first statement.

It is, if you like, the exact problem that copyright enforcement and digital rights management (DRM) have. No matter what you do, if you send me a threat and I really want to forward that to the police department, I can always hit "Print Screen." Simply showing X to me enables me to copy X. If you let me play music out of my headphones, I can always in principle connect my headphone jack to a computer's microphone input and get a lossy-but-acceptable DRM-free copy, because my headphone jack does not implement DRM. (In the early DRMed days of iTunes we used to do this with burning music to CDs, which iTunes allowed.

Just allowing a kid to enter the movie theater allows him to smuggle in a camera and post the video on BitTorrent. Just seeing is always sufficient for lossy copying, if only because we keep a lossy copy in our memories. (I've discussed this elsewhere but I'd prefer not to linkspam myself.)

[tjic]

> I was tired of seeing my friends violate the confidentiality of our private conversations, by constantly forwarding our emails to third parties.

You're trying to solve a SOCIAL problem with TECHNOLOGY.

Better solution: get ACTUAL friends who won't stab you in the back given the chance.

[fec]

Sometimes what you may attribute to malice, is actually just carelessness or stupidity.

[Loque_k]

Njix is right, but don't let the flaws in this experiment prevent you from sharing and building more projects.

He does point out a valuable lesson, do not try and fix a problem from one area with another, which applies a lot in development... I see people fixing CSS rendering issues with JS for instance.

[johnsocs]

I too understand the motivation of the project yet.... IMO if you can't trust the person you are having a conversation with then don't have it.

Great job at building something people are using, although it's not something I'd use.