How to send self-destructing emails from your Gmail account
Ephemeral messages are quite big now, because many people love the idea of sending messages and images that won't remain on the Internet until the end of times and haunt them for the rest of their lives. There are several specialized applications that allow you to send self-destructing texts, but finding a tool to provide this functionality for the emails that you send from your Gmail account has actually been quite difficult. The good news is that I have recently stumbled upon a really cool Chrome extension called Dmail which allows you to do exactly that.
Using Dmail, you will be able to send emails that will self-destruct after one hour, one day or one week. Curios how to do that? It's actually quite easy. I'll show you:
- The first thing you will need is Chrome installed on your PC.
- Now, sign into the browser using the Gmail account that you want to send ephemeral messages from.
- Go to the Chrome Web Store, download the Dmail extension and install it.
- Sign into your Gmail account from Chrome.
- Accept Dmail's request to act like your email manager.
Now that you have Dmail up and running, you can use your Gmail account the same way you would do regularly. Press the Compose button and choose the contact or contacts that should receive your self-destructing message, then enter the desired subject, text, attachments, etc. Now, you should notice the new bar that has appeared directly above your Send button. The first button is a slider which allows you to turn Dmail on and off (when it's off, your emails will be sent using the usual method), while the second one will allow you to select the time when the email will self-destruct. There are four available options: Never, In 1 hour, In 1 day and In 1 week, but unfortunately, there are no customizable settings, so if you need a middle option like 6 hours or 3 days, you can't make it happen automatically. (It can be done, but you will need to do it manually, the way you will see in the following paragraph.)
Beside giving you an incredibly easy yet effective way to send self-destructing email, Dmail also offers another huge advantage. Gmail's latest features enable you to pull back an email you've sent by mistake (or rethought), but only in the first 30 seconds after you've pressed the "send" button. Unfortunately, 30 seconds is very rarely enough. Dmail offers a better solution to this problem by allowing you to destroy any emails you've sent with the help of the extension, at any given time. All you have to do is click on the All Dmails button from the upper-right side of your Inbox (next to the search bar), and you will see all the mails that you've ever sent using the extension. From there you can select which emails you want disappear from the receiver's email account.
Since you now know how to send self destructing emails using your Gmail account, you might also want to read about the best tools to help you send secret messages on iOS. Furthermore, if you're having trouble keeping your emails organized, there are also articles that show you the best email clients to use on a Mac and the best services to help you sort out your mails.
