Comments on: Email should have Expiration Dates

By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:06:06 +0000

Is it done yet:-)
I too found your post because I was searching for something that would do this. I think the pizza company could be motivated to use this feature if people unsubscribed otherwise. I do think that most reputable companies, i.e. The ones you sign up for mailings with do unsubscribe you, and many ask why.
The clinet would need a lot of configuration though so Im not sure using this feature would be within the capability of most users.

By: Ron

Ron — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:28:52 +0000

I found your page because I had the same exact thought. I get a lot of email from the many lists I am on and it would be nice if they would just “expire” after a while. One example is pizza chains. Always sending out specials and coupons. If they had an expiration date encoded into the email the receiver would not have to even see the email any longer once the deal has ended.

By: Mason Lee

Mason Lee — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:34:23 +0000

Regarding email expire headers, there is also this: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-welzl-expires-00.txt

By: Shailen

Shailen — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:30:57 +0000

being on the office laptop kinda stunts me from installing other browsers with full functionality like flash and the other stuff. So I stick to ie6 :P

By: Rohit

Rohit — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:35:42 +0000

I see the problem as who will bell the cat!

By the sender of that email who cares about the recipients;

The last thing I want is my bank sending me my monthly statement and putting an expiry date on it. Then I have to pay them to retrieve my 3 year old statement that I could have got by searching my mailbox.

By the email client (MUA) used by the sender, automatically inferring from certain common-sense words; e.g. subject contains lunch and body is less than 100 bytes;

Hmmm, when was the last time you trusted your MUA to act intelligently, especially with purging stuff. Even your mail identified as Spam is still dumped in your mailbox so that you can review it.

By the email server software that intelligently tags email based on common patterns seen across multiple users;

The whole point of the internet is that people have individual preferences and you do not find patterns with a lot of accuracy. Case in point, Amazon/Ebay recommendations. They are perhaps one of the most advanced algorithms in use, but I doubt if their accuracy is anywhere near 90%.

By the recipient’s email client, based on heuristics;

Same problem as with point number 2.

By the recipient’s email client, based on a user-defined rule set;

Isn’t that what you call filters for your favourite MUA?

Or explicitly by the recipient in a spring cleaning session.

Isn’t that the same as manual sorting?

By: Manas

Manas — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:42:31 +0000

I stopped caring about IE6 a long time ago. :) Just get Chrome, Safari, Firefox (or if you can’t help it, IE8) and ditch IE6 already. The entire web developer community will thank you for it!

By: Shailen

Shailen — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:02:30 +0000

btw.. some issue with your website on ie6. Dates are out of the date image, ads on the top push the first post after ads and the comment box spans beyond the scope of the slider.

By: Shailen

Shailen — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:01:28 +0000

sounds like a good idea. I do tag n file my email like you mentioned and prefer using advance search options when it comes to finding something. But I do let it archive after 6 months

By: Pardha

Pardha — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:10:34 +0000

Manas, I think you hit on an important issues here. I love what you are proposing and the rationale behind this idea. Like you suggest, the expiration date can be set by the sender, receiver, or mail client (some sort of rule-based decision making).

I am thinking something along the lines of how Mail provides suggestions for iCal events by parsing dates embedded in the message body. So when there is a date in the text, it would be great if I can say delete this email n days after this date.

Sign me up for any prototypes/ideas you come up with. I would love to try it out. Anything to help manage my increasing quantities of email is a hit in my book.

By: Manuel

Manuel — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:47:41 +0000

Love it, where do I sign up for this? We can start it by defining rules in our email clients that look at this particular header and move the files to a folder. Lets do it…