[imp] Ability to send “Copy Protected” mail

[Andy Dorman]

On 09/12/2013 08:52 AM, Michael J Rubinsky wrote:
>
> Quoting Andy Dorman <adorman at ironicdesign.com>:
>
>> On 09/12/2013 06:52 AM, Vikas Parashar wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Since last some days, i am searching a web-clients for mail server.
>>> HOrde
>>> is one of feature rich web-client that i found.
>>>
>>> Could any body please let me know how can i achieve
>>>
>>> Ability to send “Copy Protected” mail that cannot be forwarded,
>>> printed, or
>>> cut/copy and paste.
>>>
>>> Looking fwd to hear from you soon.
>>>
>>
>> An email is just a file, mostly text, with "special" bits like images,
>> pdfs and zip files sent via smtp.  There is no way you can "stop" the
>> recipient from doing anything they want with that file once they have
>> it on their computer.
>>
>> You can encrypt part of the file (the email "body") to make it
>> unreadable by anyone without the proper decryption tool (or a very
>> fast quantum computer code breaker)...but once they have the file in
>> their possession, you have NO control or say over what they can do
>> with it.
>
> The original poster may be referring to features such as Exchange's
> Information Rights Management. This allows exactly this level of
> control, but obviously only works within a controlled MS Exchange
> environment. This type of feature, as already stated, is not going to be
> available in a groupware stack built upon open standards such as IMAP,
> SMTP etc...
>
>

Good point.  I forgot that today you can send an email encrypted by one 
of the several proprietary Information Rights Management (IRM) systems 
(Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, etc) and that email can only be decrypted and 
used appropriately by someone with the same IRM system.

I did a bit of searching and did not find anything discussing any open 
IRM standards that could be used by Horde or any other open source 
application.  But if such standards exist, I would hope we, the horde 
community, could eventually expand the system to be able to offer it.

-- 
Andy Dorman