The CEO of the email company, OtherInBox, Joshua Baer, has recently proposed a new email standard that he hopes will take off. The idea is that emails should carry a new header that lets the in-box that the email is only valid until, and expires after a certain date. When the expiry date has passed, the email client/service should automatically delete the expired email. This concept will help users to automatically clean their inboxes by removing emails such as coupons and invitations that have gone past their due dates. It could even be applied to notifications of group activities, shipping notices or even system alerts (that become irrelevant after a certain time period). A pretty clever idea, since I’m one of those people who can’t be bothered going through old messages just to delete expired coupons. The only problem with this proposal is that it is a standard, and he’ll need to get everyone on board or at least the major email client/service players if he wants it to be successful. What do you think of self-deleting emails?
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