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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

The linked article claims that an e-mail can be deleted from the recipient's email in-box, regardless of whether the recipient is running a Pluto client.

Earth to Pluto ... assuming the received e-mail is a classic plain-text e-mail, that's impossible. Either the recipient is running a Pluto-compliant client, in which case the claim is true, or the recipient is not running a Pluto-compliant client, in which case the claim is false.

The only way this could work is if the received e-mail has content linked to Pluto's site (example would be an HTML e-mail containing an iframe with hosted content), where the real e-mail is located. So ... they should be honest and say that.

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I just tested this service with gmail and it did in fact work. Pluto sends an image that contains the body of the message. After about 30 seconds the image is replaced with another that says "this message has expired."

A very remarkable hack! Especially since Gmail caches images on their own proxy servers. I wonder how long until Google finds a way to prevent this?

Here's some background information about the founders. One is a CS grad from Stanford, and former Google employee-- http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/4/2/law-school-email-...

> A very remarkable hack! Especially since Gmail caches images on their own proxy servers. I wonder how long until Google finds a way to prevent this?

I don't think they cache. It's more an issue of privacy, HTTPS assets, malware checking, etc.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.htm...

An image. Excuse me, but that's not a remarkable hack, that's just B.S. hack, which can't be fairly called sending an "email".

I'm curious what approach they took, because iframes don't really work in email (the majority of the clients block them, including gmail which they use in their example). Another option would be an image rendering of the message, but that would be pretty annoying to the recipient for not being able to select, copy or re-flow text.

They do images, with a link "click here to view as text" that redirects to sendpluto's web viewer.

Now that google fetches the images from its own servers once and then renders for all, would this even work?

Sure, if they used a unique filename for each email. Something like render.png?id=12345.

no, he means that because google caches the image upon reciept you can neither change the email nor delete it after it is sent.

I guess that's why the email can only be unsent or modified until the recipient opens it.

We support unsend at anytime. We technically could also support edit at anytime, even after open, but we do not because we believe editing after open serves no legitimate purpose - just manipulation. It doesn’t even seem fun to us. Thanks for commenting.

Lindsay, Co-Founder @ Pluto Mail

Last I've checked google does proxy the images, but doesn't cache nor prefetch them. Has anything changed recently?

If that's true, then it's misleading to call it e-mail. All the recipient gets is a link to an offsite database.

Hi lutusp,

The content displays automatically in the email client. The link is only relevant if you want to copy/paste/make in-line comments. Thanks for your comment.

Lindsay Co-Founder @ Pluto Mail

Based on https://www.sendpluto.com/help, it looks like they could be creating images of the email text and sending the images in an email. That way, they're free to manipulate the image even after the email is sent.

doesn't gmail cache all images?

This would only for images linked back to Pluto correct? If they simply sent an image surely they can't come into my inbox and modify files?

Correct. The scheme requires some way to link the received e-mail's content to Pluto's servers. This must be so because it's not possible to delete or modify an independent email (i.e. one without links) once it's been delivered.

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