Can I prevent my mail from being forwarded by others?

Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this article.

There are no comments on this article yet.

Here's an interesting idea... put a copyright statement in your signature file, stating your e-mail is copyrighted 2006 by you and forwarding is prohibited without your express permission.

According to...

http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/copynet.htm

...as long as you file the copyrighted material with the Library of Congress and pay the copyright fee within 3 months of "publication" (i.e. sending the message), you can sue the person who forwarded the e-mail for $150,000 in statutory damages and attorney fees.

The tricky part is "publication".

Now, IANAL and from what I've read, this is still just a legal *theory*. Whether sending an e-mail to an individual could constitute "publication" is still up in the air and could go either way. It might be worth the $30 to send an e-mail to someone, then file a copyright application for it and see if the Copyright Office approves the application.

If the sending of an e-mail to one person did get legal status as "publication" of the e-mail, it would certainly protect your e-mail from being forwarded by any U.S. recipient if you put the copyright notice in it.

If they forwarded it that day and it caused you harm and/or embarrassment, you could call your lawyer and file a $150,000 suit.

- Greg

a hacker went into my pc and foward message and got all my contact...what can i do to stop this? I already change my password, is this is enough? plz tell me what I have to do?? I am worry if he have acsess to my file.

Thanks

Leticia

If you use Outlook 2003 there is the ability to request read receipts and recevied receipts.. but most of these are diasbled now because of spam and virus vulnerabilities. Bascily things being used maliciously.... so yes.. the capabilities are there for some of the aforementioned inabilities, nevertheless I would look around in the options of your message you're sending and make the message expire in a short amount of time, that way it doesn't get forwarded after a certain amount of time. I may be wrong, but i think it works without an exchange server... Leo.. ya or nay?

There's no way to make a standard e-mail message self-destruct without the receiving party essentially agreeing to it by using software that accepts and executes the self-destruct instructions.

Yeah, message expiration is just as unreliable as anything else.

Can someone program an email to automatically delete once sent to the recipient or viewed by the recipient?

No.

you may be able to stop people from changing, forwarding, printing and even copying your email. Look into IRM from Microsoft.

From what I can tell that only works with Microsoft products - might be an ok corporate solution (Exchange in the corporation could do some of these things), but not for the general public.

And ultimately, anything the recipient sees on the screen can be captured and printed, and possibly forwarded on.

Think someone is using my email in an outside program. I change my password alot. But lately I am getting return email from a few address that are not mine. this is part of the message.
"This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server.
Outlook user = login to hotmail website"
I use outlook. but NOT on this account. From comments I see that I have been hacked. IS this true? and how do I prevent this from happening, BESIDES changing my password daily or weekly?
Thank you for your time.

To post a comment on "Can I prevent my mail from being forwarded by others?", please return to that article's main page.