Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
Self destructing messages are seemingly becoming all the rage at the moment – SnapChat with it’s self-destructing pics; Wickr with its self-destructing SMS, videos and PDFs and Efemr with its self-destructing tweets – to name just a few recent arrivals. And now email. Telecoms giant AT&T has had a patent published recently which paves the way for emails which have a short life and then self-destruct.
The patent explains a system whereby the sender can set rules on how the email can be viewed – for instance can it be forwarded on? If so, to whom? The email sender can also set a date and time after which the email becomes unreadable. And that all important self-destruct means you can remotely destroy a message you’ve sent. From a security point of view this is far preferable to the current alternative of recalling an email – an exercise which often fails even if the person you’ve sent the email to hasn’t even yet read the email.
AT&T’s email system won’t work with all email. The person you’re sending the email to would also have to have the right AT&T software installed as well.
The system is unlikely to be adopted widely for day-to-day sending of personal emails, but in business where there is a need to have full control over sensitive data, having full control over where emails are sent (and being notified when emails are treated outside rules) is hugely important.
However as ever there’s an Achilles heel to this product. A good old fashioned screen-grab would still work. With this in mind perhaps the danger is that AT&T’s system could give businesses a false sense of security.
James Barnes, StatusCake.com
James Barnes
Share this
More from StatusCake
AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See
10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about
James Barnes
April 2, 2026
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026