'Mission Impossible' Email — It self-destructs

It's the new new thing and best of all, it's free — the way we like it.

It's happening right now at www.bigstring.com.

For those who'd prefer to find out more before signing up or drinking bigstring's Kool-Aid, here's Howie Rumberg's July 12, 2007 Associated Press story.

The Doh! Files — This e-mail will self-destruct in 10 seconds

Here's a scenario that way too many people are familiar with: You just went on a fantastic date and decide to send a friend a blow-by-blow e-mail. Instead you type the fresh-in-your-memory, newly acquired address of the potential steady and hit the send button just... as... you... realize... you are sending it to the last person in the world who should see it.

In the past, unless you had Mission Impossible-style computer tools, you kissed date No. 2 goodbye. But no longer.

BigString Corporation has come up with a free e-mail service (www.BigString.com) that gives the author ultimate control over his outbox. That's right. The outbox.

Users can recall e-mails from a recipient's inbox, cause a message to self-destruct after a certain number of reads or after a set period of time, edit an e-mail after it's been sent, make it look as if the mail is coming from another account or prohibit forwarding to unwanted parties, among a slew of other face-saving functions. And in the age of YouTube, you can prevent your embarrassing videos from being posted in unwanted places.

As the name suggests, each e-mail you send has a big "string" attached and all it takes is a simple "tug" to bring it back.

The magic string works like this: BigString converts the e-mail to what is basically a simple Web page (an HTML document) and stores it on their server. When you change or delete the documents or attachments, you are not actually breaking into the recipient's inbox, but changing the virtual string that goes from BigString's server to that inbox.

Once an e-mail is self-destructed or deleted, all that is left in the recipients' inbox is a record of the mail being sent and the subject line. The message has been deleted off the BigString servers and there is no record of the original message anywhere. (It's like a phone record: the content of the call is gone but the number called is still there.)

While those phantom e-mails may disappoint recipients, the idea sounds like a such a no-brainer for the sender that you have to wonder why a big e-mail service such as Gmail didn't patent the features first. Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds said in an e-mail that Google is responsive to user feedback, but did not list any of the BigString-style features for future versions of Gmail.

Darin Myman, CEO of BigString, came up with the idea after he sent an e-mail with the wrong attachment. It wasn't a disaster, but a friend had a worse experience: He was caught cheating when his wife looked through his sent mail.

Ownership of the outbox became Myman's goal. BigString achieves it, but don't think the service will completely save you from miscues.

Masking your e-mail address is not foolproof. While the address in the recipient's inbox changes, the IP address — that string of numbers that identifies Web locations — doesn't, so someone with a little Internet savvy could find out where you're really messaging from. Also, the function that prevents printing doesn't always work on the browser Firefox.

With so much of our lives left out there in the Internet ether to be picked over and used in ways we never even imagined, the innovations at BigString — despite the flaws — are a giant step toward taking back control of our electronic lives.