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How can I prevent recipients of my e-mails from forwarding them to other people?

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Oh, how I wish there was. Maybe I should look into curses. – Chris Dwyer May 17 '10 at 23:36
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as in "don't forward this email or I'll #@$!& kill you" curses? – David Zaslavsky May 17 '10 at 23:44
Actually, more of the "you'll get hit by a bus if you forward this e-mail" :) – Chris Dwyer May 18 '10 at 5:12
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migrated from stackoverflow.com May 17 '10 at 23:22

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6 Answers

up vote 10 down vote

T​h​ere is not.

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up vote 3 down vote

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up vote 2 down vote

Ultimately this comes down to a trust issue. The problem isn't if a user can forward the email, the real issue is if you can trust the person not to share the information the email contains. There is NO way to deliver information to someone without some possibility of them sharing the information, short of killing them the instant they receive it. The ONLY way to ensure information will not be shared is to never share it in the first place. Either establish trust in that person, or don't send the email.

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up vote 0 down vote

AFAIK, if you don't administer the email server where the email is received, then no, you can't restrict anybody to forward your mail.

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It's not even a matter of the email server. There is little preventing someone from starting an email client on an unrestricted machine and copying and pasting the contents into a completely new envelope. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams May 17 '10 at 23:19
Deliver it in Flash? :) – dash-tom-bang May 17 '10 at 23:20
@dash-tom-bang: You still have printscreen. If people can see what you sent, then can just copy it if it's really important information. – GmonC May 18 '10 at 0:23
Use hardware compositing so printscreen just gets a black window (like trying to printscreen DVD playback)? :) I know, I know, it's getting more and more ridiculous... – dash-tom-bang May 22 '10 at 17:44
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up vote 0 down vote

Actually my company has a product that does this.

Cisco IronPort Email Encryption

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That doesn't actually stop anyone from forwarding the email, though. It protects the content by taking it out of the email. (And it still doesn't block copy-and-paste) – David Zaslavsky May 17 '10 at 23:50
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up vote 0 down vote

Microsoft Outlook (Exchange Server) supports restricted emails.

You can set several options like:

  • can forward
  • can print
  • expiration date

Of course, there will always be ways to circumvent protection (i.e. taking a screen capture) but restricted emails make it more difficult.

The downside to restricted email is that opening email becomes more of a hassle (it may not even be possible without Outlook) and email preview is not shown.

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