This Blog Post Will Self-Destruct

Some readers of the IT Insights Blog may recall being young (or at least younger) and watching the old Inspector Gadget cartoon series. At the start of each episode, the ever-intrepid Gadget would receive his instructions from Chief Quimby in the form of a note programmed — Can you program a piece of paper? Maybe we should just say booby-trapped? — to "self-destruct" after he read it.

The reliable follow-up to this cheeky homage (more about that in a second) is that Gadget would always receive the notes from Quimby himself, popping out of a mail slot, or poking his head up from a trash can or potted plant, to make the hand-off. Wherever Quimby had just emerged from, Gadget would reliably discard the note by tossing it back in with the chief, a split-second before — KABOOM!

The whole business with self-destructing notes, of course, was a nudge-wink salute to the even older Mission: Impossible TV series. (Yes, Mission: Impossible was on TV before it became a Tom Cruise cottage industry.) The IMF team leader (first Dan Briggs, then Jim Phelps) would mysteriously receive instructions about each new assignment on a self-destructing audio tape.

The point of all of this, is that Google is apparently developing a new feature for its signature Gmail app that would let users send their own "self-destructing" notes to, oh, whoever you exchange e-mail with on a regular basis that you would prefer to disavow knowledge of. The e-mails wouldn't actually explode, of course, they would just disappear, or become unreadable gobbledygook.

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