Google working on expiring emails for Gmail

The redesign will reportedly feature an easier-to-access Calendar, the ability to send smart replies, support for offline mode, and much more. However, that doesn't seem to stop Google, as the company is now going beyond the POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocols. Gmail's expiring email will essentially become unreadable after some time. As per some screenshots, users will be able to set an expiration date so that the sent email disappears or is unreadable after a week or several years depending on what they choose. It further states that the recipient won't be able to forward, download or copy the email's contents, and attachments will be disabled.

According to Ray Kurzwell, the director of engineering at Google Research, the company's R&D branch, the recent development of word vectors form a way to "enable algorithms to learn about the relationships between words, based on examples of actual language usage". Notably, it looks like recipients of the confidential email will have to log into their Google accounts once again to read the email.

Google is all set to roll out an updated Gmail and the tech giant has already begun notifying some of the G Suite users about the same. It will also bring you a new snooze feature that lets you temporarily remove an email from your inbox for a certain period until you're ready to reply. Unless protection is offered against the incredibly simple process of taking a screenshot of any supposedly confidential mail, the whole feature might well be useless, and will simply protect against inbox searches post the expiry of the email. The compact view is the most similar to the existing Gmail design, allowing existing users to keep a similar layout.

One downside to the new Gmail design and the self-destructing emails is that it's now unclear whether the feature will work on clients other than Google. TechCrunch's report notes that a confidential message doesn't have to be encrypted, which means that it's likely that Google can still see the content of the email.