Dmail brings self-destructing emails to Gmail

If you need to stop a Gmail message you already sent but couldn’t beat the deadline of Undo Send, this new tool may do the trick. In place of the revoked email content, the recipient can see a line about receiving a message via Dmail using the view message button in the Chrome tab.

This service, however, does not physically delete emails on the recipient’s side.

Now, you can protect yourself from those careless moments with Dmail.

While Dmail lets you prevent someone reading an email you sent and gives you up to a week to so automatically, it doesn’t erase all evidence, making it better suited for sending the code to a lock or another bit of sensitive information you don’t want hanging around forever in someone’s inbox as opposed to attempting to take back a hastily worded, ill-tempered email.

It works by simply delaying the sending of any email up to 30 seconds, but as CNET reports, that may not cover all your tracks. “Only the recipient and sender can read the email legibl”, said Dmail’s Eric Kuhn to TechCrunch.

Recepients who do not have the extension installed will get an email that says the “secure message was sent using Dmail”, and may be redirected to a web view of the Dmail. Recipients who have Dmail will be able to read the email directly from Gmail. Neither Gmail nor Dmail servers ever receive both the decryption key and encrypted message. The second option lets users destroy any specific email previously sent with Dmail.

For now, Dmail is available as an extension only on Google’s Chrome browser. An iOS is being planned for an August release followed by the Android release – both will allow users to compose and read Dmails from their phones. Imagine destroying a sent PDF or PPT before it falls into the wrong hands! It might offer premium services with more options to power users and paying businesses later this year.