rxl

Well, the image containing the message is only ever served once. If the recipient navigates away from the email and then opens the email again, the image containing the message will be replaced with a different image (the message will be gone). I recommend reading the full FAQ and trying it out.

As people have said, there is always a way from someone to intercept a message. An organization can, at the ISP level, intercept all images that you access in your browser and then perform OCR on the images you receive to extract the message. So there is no foolproof solution here. However, this is simply a service that allows you to send "read only once" emails, with no SMTP records of the message on any servers. It has a certain level of protection that I feel some people will find useful, in the same way that some people really value off-the-record gchat.

Yes, if the server is compromised before a recipient reads a particular email, that can allow the attacker to read that email. However, all emails that are read are deleted from the server and unread emails are automatically deleted after a certain number of days. So, if someone was to compromise the GhostMail server, he/she would only be able to read a paltry amount of messages.

When the email is sent, there is no record of the message. There is only an image URI that points to the image that contains the message. So, the NSA won't be able to grab a copy as it's sent. However, if an organization has the ability to intercept all images that are loaded in the browser (through the ISPs, for instance), it can grab a copy of the image containing the message. In that case, some OCR would have to be done in order to extract the message (which, agreed, is not hard to do if you are explicitly looking for messages contained within images).

Why do people opt to talk on the phone or use off-the-record gchat instead of send something over email? In both cases, the conversation can still be stored, but the point is to use a communication method for which there is no automatic storage mechanism. You trust your recipient not to record all your phone calls or copy and paste all of your off-the-record gchats, but you just don't want a copy of your messages sitting in their inbox.

As far as your comment on the headers, you're absolutely right. There will always be a record that you sent some message to your recipient at a particular time with a particular subject. However, the details of the message itself are never contained within the headers.

Also, with GhostMail, you already have the ability to "undo send". You can just go into your "sent" folder and view your message before your recipient views it, rendering the message unreadable.

Agreed, I seriously wouldn't recommend sending that information online at all, but the unfortunate thing is that some people send it through email anyway. A more appropriate use case would be to send a secret that isn't damning, but that you'd just prefer wouldn't stick around in someone's inbox.

You bring up a valid concern - I'd say that this isn't something that you'd use all the time with your email, but it has its time and place (just like off-the-record gchat), and when it is needed, it really comes in handy.

What email client are you using? Are you rendering the html in the email? There should be an image displayed below that text.

Think about gchat's off-the-record feature. Anyone can copy and paste an entire conversation, but the thing is, most people aren't motivated enough to copy every single one, so you have an added element of safety. Further, everyone I use ghcat off-the-record with is someone I trust - I just don't want a copy of the chat sitting in their email.

When a landlord is doing a credit check, you can also send your SSN with some peace of mind.

You could also record all of your phone conversations and copy all of your off-the-record gchats into text documents, couldn't you? The point isn't for this to be absolutely foolproof, but rather that when you have a somewhat sensitive conversation with someone you trust, you can have some peace of mind that there won't be a hard record of what you are saying.

The problem I see with this article is that it trashes one particular company and the VC backing of that company and attempts to use that to make a larger point about vc-backed e-commerce companies in general.

So OK, maybe that company isn't great. Maybe the VC's made a mistake with that particular investment. Or maybe the founders and VC's know something that you don't. Either way, one's observations about a company should be limited to that company and not be generalized to the entire space the company is in, unless of course there is sufficient compelling data.

You're right, I feel like it can be useful in so many contexts. And I'm sure there is one application that will hit it out of the park. I just can't put my finger on it, though.