AN E-MAIL SHREDDER?

a new service which lets you tell your e-mail messages when to shred themselves.

It's called Disappearing E-Mail Administrator, appropriately enough. It's the management component of Disappearing's e-mail expiration service which lets the customers set the policy for how long their e-mail messages can be stored until they hit the cybershredder - say, for 90 days after they're sent.

"For the first time ever, there's a corporatewide solution where a company can get their hands around the e-mail policy at one point of control," says Disappearing co-founder Dave Marvit to ZDNet News.

Disappearing isn't the only Net company coming forth with this-e-mail-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds offerings - Qvtech and ZipLip.com have also come up offering time-expiring e-mail packagings, ZDNet says - and the Microsoft antitrust case may have been a prod for it.

How so? According to ZDNet, the Justice Department's hunt of Microsoft "was a painfully visible illustration of how old e-mail messages can come back to haunt the sender" - Microsoft's credibility was smashed repeatedly by the government by way of incriminating messages sent by company executives and subpoenaed by Justice.

Disappearing expects to charge $4 a month for the service and focuses only on making e-mail expire after specified times, ZDNet says. "Here's how it works: For every outgoing message, Disappearing's client software queries the company's central encryption-key server - hosted at AboveNet's data facility - which returns a key and a message identification number. The message is encrypted, and off it goes."

The message is readable at once if the receiver has Disappearing's plug-in, but without the plug-in the reader can see it as an HTML attachment in a Web browser, ZDNet continues. For now, the service offers a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook only, but Disappearing plans plug-ins for other popular e-mail programs later this year.

And after the sender's specified days expire, the message key expires - and the message can't be read by anyone. Of course, a recipient could still cut and paste the text into a new document - but Disappearing tells ZDNet they're not trying to solve the sabotage problem.

"We're just trying to change the default behavior of e-mail from never going away to expiring over time," he tells ZDNet.