* Sending recordless e-mails with VaporStream
Some people believe that when e-mail is deleted, it’s deleted. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
When you send an e-mail, a copy is usually stored in your Sent Mail folder; on your company’s e-mail server; on a backup tape; in a backed up .PST or other archive; on your home machine; and at all these venues at the recipient’s site. Deleting your copy of an e-mail erases, at best, only one-half of the total copies.
Last week, Void Communications introduced VaporStream, a product the company demonstrated to me this summer. VaporStream is designed to send completely recordless e-mails through a Web-based interface.
VaporStream works by separating a sender’s name, e-mail address and the date the message was sent from the body of the message, guaranteeing the inability to connect header information and the body of e-mail messages. Further, messages sent using VaporStream cannot be printed, forwarded to others, copied to an e-mail store, edited or copied, helping to ensure that the information sent via the system is completely transient.
Benefits of the system include the lack of any footprint on messaging servers, backups or archives and the ability to send messages with complete privacy. Plus, because e-mails are sent through VaporStream’s infrastructure, they are guaranteed to be free of viruses, worms, spam and other content.
Void offers a number of administrative capabilities for VaporStream so that content using the system can be managed according to corporate policies. Mobile devices can also send and receive e-mails using the system.
The benefits of VaporStream are obvious – the ability to send and receive e-mails that leave absolutely no trace of ever being sent. This can be a major boon to people who need to send confidential e-mails for which no record of communications is required, and also to those who want to send nonbusiness e-mails using corporate resources.
While I don’t foresee the majority of corporate e-mail being sent this way in the future, VaporStream satisfies a very useful niche market in the e-mail space.
