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Comment by cfmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

The point of confidential mode is for corporate users. When the CEO sends out that confidential mail to the company, it adds a speed bump to users who are about to copy out data that they have been told they should not, so they get a chance to realize they should not do this, and then removes all plausible deniability when they choose to bypass that speed bump.

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Actually, in many corporate cases BOTH parties want to keep the info confidential - the CEO sends over salary details to CFO to load into payroll system. After it's all loaded and printed for the files (or saved in the HR system), they BOTH want it to auto-expire out of their emails, but both are too busy to scrape back through old emails after a month to delete things.

So this confidential mode let's this happen naturally. When the CFO's email is hacked (which it will be eventually at some company) then all is not lost.

I'm sure many other users will find it useful.

So confidential mode is a cumbersome retention mechanism? A simple email rule can do this for all messages.

Some messages are MUCH more sensitive than others. You might have a default 3-5 year rule (many corps do). That’s way too long for some messages.

especially if sending across an ou boundary where you don’t know the retention treatment this will be great.

Sales teams can be very sloppy w email -> auto import into CRMs, sharing permissions, delegating permissions, running their own optimization apps etc. Because the want to claim credits for sales they don’t like tight retention limits etc

Everywhere I have ever worked has a 30 day email retention policy. This would never change message to message. It’s a regulatory issue and you have no reason to retain messages longer than the minimum so you’re better off enforcing it at the server level.

So because most businesses according to your experience retain emails for just 30 days this feature is not needed.

I’m curious if anyone has worked at a place that retains email longer than 30 days, I know I have

Agree to that, it’s a pretty strong signal stating possible appropriate uses. If I receive an encrypted MS Office document with Do Not Forward policy, I know that if I want to share it further I need to ask the permission from the sender.

It is almost as if calling it "confidential" may be misleading.

Sounds exactly like confidential content works now, except with more than red text saying "confidential" on slides or similar.

It matches the name of an existing Outlook/Exchange feature that people have used for many years. Naming it anything else would have been confusing.

In Outlook's docs, they also refer to it as "IRM-protected mail", which seems clearer to me. https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/mark-your-email-as-...

Both Google and MS provide a disclaimer that explains Information Rights Management can't prevent "malicious programs" from by bypassing the restrictions.

> When the CEO sends out that confidential mail to the company

...they make it available to Google first, and then to the employees.

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