Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to send some private information, or secured information, to someone via emails? But, you didn't want them to keep it? For example, I'm working with a Cruise Agent and she's saying I can pay for my deposit with a credit card via a phone call or I could email her my information.
Well, if I called her to give her my credit card information, she'll need to write it down and apply it when she's ready to receive my deposit. Or, I can just email her the information, but then she'll have that email in her system.
Thanks to a new feature that I didn't even know existed until now, I can now send a timed secured email to someone using Gmail.
As I was typing my credit card information in, Gmail automatically recognized what I was doing and gave me a small "pop up" letting me know that I can "Turn confidential mode on/off". That definitely struck my curiosity...
As soon as I saw that notification for the option, I clicked on that link (circled in red) and I was giving a new window with the Confidential Mode options shown below in the picture.
I set my expiration to "tomorrow", yet there are other options available in that drop down. I also wanted to try out the "required passcode" feature to see what that would do as well. At that time, nothing happened when I clicked "SMS passcode". I clicked on the radio button and then Save.
I finished my email out completely and then I hit "send", and that is when I received the pop up window that you see below looking for the recipients cell phone number to send the SMS to.
When my Cruise Agent opened the email, she shared a screen shot of what she received; a notification to have Gmail send her a one time code via SMS to access my email. Which, she only has a day to do what she needs as the email is timed to erase itself from her server tomorrow.
Of course, she can write down my information still, but at least she can't copy and paste the information and I have a trail of this being sent to her.
Great job Google! Now hopefully they keep this feature going forward, or at least improve it more.