Show HN: UnSend.it Beta, modify / unsend any email after it's been sent | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: UnSend.it Beta, modify / unsend any email after it's been sent

unsend.it

6 pointslepunk7 comments

here is a video of how it works (sorry about the audio quality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLYYh_fuCE8

Very very impressive. I am very curious how you do it. What about privacy by the way?

Thanks, its only in beta so its not perfect but getting there

bramgg is right in his comment. we are using images to display the text. when the user edits / "unsends" and email we simply re-render the image.

bramgg is also right about gmail's image caching however we found a way around it

as for the privacy: we will upload our policy soon (it's being reviewed atm). but simply put: - we do not ever sell your data to 3rd party - all of the email info are stored heavily encrypted on our servers - the images are behind a secure proxy - once you delete an email it completely removed from our servers

how is it done?

I have no affiliation with the product, but since the email protocol obviously doesn't actually allow altering emails after they've been sent, I can tell you the only two ways something like this could operate.

1) The email isn't actually sent when you click send. There's a delay where you can go back and edit/delete it. This is effectively the same as saving an email as a draft and then having it auto-send five minutes later.

2) The email is actually just text on an external image or on some external web page visible through an iFrame. Neither of these really work because modern day email services like Gmail cache images and pass them through their own servers. Most email clients also block iFrames by default.

Based on their website I assume UnSend.it uses one of number 2. An interesting hack and definitely Hacker News worthy, but in practice I don't think it can be reliable.

There is also always the possibility that I'm wrong and there's a secret method #3, but I really doubt that.

#2 is an interesting hack indeed. But from the demo video (posted in a different comment), it also works for attachment so I don't think he is using this method.

Edit: I signed up and you were right. He uses a remote image. It works when I email using the unsend.it web app but doesn't work if I send it through the Gmail website so I couldn't test the attachment.

It will be very interesting if it was without any time delays. I currently use gmail delay hack "Undo Send", that allows something similar. It always delays my email couple of minutes and displays an option to undo the sent email.

Anyway, nice idea!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com