Monitoring
Status Pages
Pricing
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
Share this
4 min read On 13th August 2026, a storm knocked out cooling at RadiusDC’s Phoenix data centre, which hosted essential Namecheap operations. To protect hardware from thermal damage, Namecheap took services offline while temporary chillers were brought in. The incident and recovery ran for roughly 30 hours, with Namecheap’s own site unreachable for about 11 hours 42 minutes
3 min read On Wednesday 19 August, Monzo had an outage. DownDetector logged more than 3,000 reports by midday. Monzo’s own statement was direct about what it did next: it activated Monzo Stand-in, its fully independent backup bank, while it investigated an issue affecting customers. By the end of the day, Monzo said the issue was resolved and
3 min read GitHub’s incident on 17 August 2026 ran from 13:28 to 21:15 UTC, seven hours and forty-seven minutes. At peak, web and API traffic saw error rates of around 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached roughly 50%. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were affected alongside Git operations, Actions, Pages, Issues, Pull Requests
3 min read Adding a new website, launching a customer portal, or handing a service to a new team should be straightforward. Setting up monitoring is part of that job, but it is easy for a manual step to be missed when information is spread across several systems. StatusCake now integrates with viaSocket, giving teams a way to connect
7 min read A website may be standing and still be in trouble. It may answer a request, return a cheerful 200 OK, and yet load slowly enough that visitors begin to lose patience. Its certificate may be nearing expiry. Its domain records may have changed. A server may be filling its disk in the background, patient and
6 min read StatusCake tells you that something might be broken. Hermes can check whether it really looks broken, decide who should hear about it, send the email, and keep the record for tomorrow morning’s summary.
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
