The point of email is to communicate. Years ago, when I felt like I was one of 4 people in Canada with an email account, I read a bit on email ettiquette. One of the points always stuck with me, “One day you will send an email that you will regret.” I have indeed.

Have you ever sent an email message that you regret? Big corporate servers sometime allow users to recall their sent email, if it is sent to a co-worker. Traditionally though, when you fire off that heated response to politically charged cult leader (he who’s name we shall not speak is what we call him)… your mail is gone forever and you can’t take it back.

The ability to get delivery and read reciepts is also a function that is missing in many modern email clients and web based email solutions such as gmail.

Enter the solutions: PointofMail

PointofMail is a great web service that allows you to send email by appening .poinofmail.com to the email recipients address. The email goes through the PointofMail server and then spins off to the intended recipient. You can setup your account to simply track delivery, opens and forwarded email. If you wish though, you can kick it up a notch and send your mail so that it can self destruct after a pre-determined period of time or so that you can, at will, recall the message.

In order to facilitate instant self destructing email or email that you can litterally yank out of the other persons inbox, PointofMail actually converts the email into an image and send the image to the final recipient. When you recall a message, PointofMail simply deletes the image off of their secure server. Should the person look at the message after it is recalled, you can have a polite little note show up… “sorry, I recalled my note because it was time sensitive, please call me …”

One nice feature is the ability to track attachments, such as how many times an attachment is read. You can also track your email message as it is being forwarded. In terms of sending sales proposals or other sensitive documents, you can learn quite a bit about the interest in your message by the frequency that it is opened, and forwarded.

Incidentally, when you send through PointofMail, you dont’ have to recall the message completely. You can simply edit the message. Change the message completely if you wish and it simply updates in the recipients email box!

If you send a document that is highly confidential and you want to, you can send it with a prompt to automatically delete itself if the first recipient tries to forward it to another person.  You can even password protect these highly sensitive messages with PointoMail!

PointofMail.com has plans starting as low as $29.99 per year.  Check it out here…

Cheers – David A. West
Calgary Social Media Consultant

Regards - David A. West

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