Witness the use of sensitive E-mail in the Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Microsoft. But startup Disappearing Inc. has a solution that should give companies the type of control over their private E-mail that they now have with paper documents. Disappearing Email lets users write their messages in the electronic equivalent of disappearing ink.
Users can set a time period after which a message can no longer be read.
The system consists of client software, available for Microsoft Outlook, and a service that resides on the software vendor's servers. Disappearing also offers a developers' kit that lets users port the system to other mail clients. Users can download a free trial copy of the client software from the company's Web site. AlphaServ aims to make information retrieval over the Web as simple as accessing information in a database. The company created the Network Query Language to retrieve data from Web sites, databases, E-mail servers, directory servers, legacy systems, and enterprise resource planning applications.