‘Kill’ a Mistaken Email Sent and All its Content with New Content Control Technology

Wouldn’t it be great if we could “kill” mis-sent emails even after delivery?

Mis-sending emails has been a problem since the dawn of email. We’ve all been there. You ‘replied all’ instead of to a single, intended recipient. You fired off a missive with some colorful metaphors that in hindsight was ‘ill-advised’ (as HR might say). Speaking of HR, you may have emailed John from AR instead of Joan from HR about a medical issue.

One could argue that mis-sending email is now just another part of the human condition like experiencing grief at the loss of a pet, joy when a child gets married, or denial when faced with the number you see on your bathroom scale. However, gone are the days when mis-sending emails made for a funny happy hour story or something that can be apologized for and moved on from.

Now that sensitive financial, legal, and IP documentation are making their way through email at a rate unseen in human history, the risks now are too great that key information makes its way into the wrong hands—accidental or not.

We’ve thus entered into a new era where data leak protection must be approached from two angles: killing mis-sent documents and (since cybercriminals are often today lurking in your recipient’s inboxes eavesdropping) ensuring sensitive documents are not sitting in recipient email inboxes too long while hackers try to gain access to those mailboxes. This week we’ll be dealing with the mis-sent email angle of data leak protection.

So, as we continue our ‘Wouldn’t it Be Great…” series on Tech Essentials, I must ask: Wouldn’t it be great if, when someone on my team mis-sent a sensitive document to the wrong person, we could “kill” it even after delivery.

First off, I have to note that RPost would not be able to block these attacks at their origin (yet), as they are targeting very specific points of the email infrastructure that organizations use (i.e., specific software products). However, with powerful new content control technology in RMail and RDocs, you can redact, disappear, unsend, or effectively ‘kill’ a mistaken send and its content. Here’s how:

• RMail’s Redact+ – You can tag selected sensitive parts of an email by adding a carat sign (^) so that those parts are removed from the email body, which prevents recipients from replying or forwarding. It’s like erasing sensitive content from within an email or kill access to an attached document while at the recipient’s end.
• RMail’s Disappearing Ink – To keep ultra-sensitive parts of messages private, use RMail’s Disappearing Ink to tag certain parts of an email message so that they disappear from within the email after delivery. You can set a timeframe to have the message disappear based on the number of views, or time per view. Think of a remote-control way to “kill” certain content in an email even after sending it.
• RDocs’ Kill Selected –RDocs™ offers a document-killing capability that allows users to permanently delete any document and all of its traces, including metadata. This ensures that confidential documents are completely wiped out and cannot be accessed by unauthorized users.

The very recently-uncovered Barracuda hack granted access to all email accounts inside (as reported) 10,000 companies and government agencies. The hack was not discovered for many months while hackers retained full access to these accounts. Based on what we’re hearing and reading, we believe that RMail and RDocs content control technology could have thwarted damage to you that this hack and others like it do.

• Do you KNOW if your email at your recipient was exposed to cybercriminals based on THEIR use of Barracuda? Of course not.
• Would you like to kill those sensitive documents INSIDE their inbox just in case? Yes!

As we’ve been saying in so many words in recent weeks, humans make mistakes, and these mistakes can have larger-than-life consequences. What we’ve done with RMail and RDocs content controls is try to mitigate them as quickly as possible, so that one day we can return to joking about (potential) email mis-sends at happy hour.

Feel free to contact us to learn more about RMail and RDocs content controls.