How to avoid email forwarding?

[Candace]

I was thinking that there is any way to prevent the email being forwarded to other people. Because if I send mails to other they forward the mail to other people with the same subject and body and it also shows that original sender of the email. Which in some case, a bit annoying. If there is any software or any procedure through which I can prevent to the forwarding of email to other. Means if I sent the mail then can be read by only that user and that cannot be forwarded in manner.

[johnson22]

The simple answer to your intelligent question is no. As per my knowledge there is no way to prevent the email from forwarding to other users. When you send the mail you losses all the controls over it. There is no reliable way that you can tell the mail is received by the intended user or not, the only thing you get is the failure demon message if the account of the user is expired. One more thing there is no way to know that if the intended recipient have received the email then he or she has read it or not.

[Techguru01]

No your cannot prevent the other users from forwarding the email, or copying it or changing it or doing anything with the email you have send. There are technologies available for knowing that the email is opened but that technology is not 100 % reliable, because you can get to know that the email is opened but the opening of email does not mean that the email has been read. In present no such technology for doing that but nobody knows the future. May be in future this can be possible.

[deveritt]

From the above replies it is clear that it is not possible to prevent the other user from sending your email to others. But if you are more concerned with the resending of email then you can maintain the database of the sent mail and sent the mail only to the trusted user, if you do not trust the recipient then do not send the mail. It will better if you send your mail in encrypted format which can only be used by only those users which have the decrypting key for that. But this also does not prevent the resending of email messages.

[Candace]

Thank you for your helpful reply. Now I have got the clear idea why it is not possible to prevent the recipient for sending the mail to other user. Recipient of the mail can easily change the email and change the email to other users also. But the idea of encrypting the email was a good idea. Now I am using the encrypting software for encrypting the mail before sending the e-mails. I need to know one more thing that is it possible un-send an email message.

[Techno01]

My friend it is clearly mentioned in the above reply that once you send the email you lose all the control over it. You cannot prevent the user from resending the email then in the similar manner you cannot un-send the email message you have send to the recipient. If you are so concern about the email messages you are sending the check and re-check your email from sending. After confirming that the email is 100 % correct then only click on the send button.

[jolo100]

Originally Posted by Candace

I was thinking that there is any way to prevent the email being forwarded to other people. Because if I send mails to other they forward the mail to other people with the same subject and body and it also shows that original sender of the email. Which in some case, a bit annoying. If there is any software or any procedure through which I can prevent to the forwarding of email to other. Means if I sent the mail then can be read by only that user and that cannot be forwarded in manner.

How about this idea.

• You send an email where the contents of the message might be from a text file, PDF file or Word formatted file that is stored on a Internet area that you control.
  
• You send your email with a link to the file, but not the contents of your file.
  
• You send the email with a "Read Receipt" on it.
  
• Once the read receipt is received, then rename or delete the file that is being linked to. Therefore it is forwarded, the file that contains your message will no longer be there.

What do you think?

Jon