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Disappearing Inc., a San Francisco startup, hopes to solve the problem with software that makes e-mail illegible to anyone but sender and recipient. It sounds like something from James Bond's gadget lab, right? It's not. Real-life encryption software called Disappearing Email is the brainchild of Maclen and David Marvit, brothers with engineering and Internet backgrounds who think they can make a business out of giving companies control over sensitive electronic communications. "Have you ever started to compose an e-mail and stopped, thinking, 'Wait, I better use the phone for this?'" asks Maclen, the company's 39-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer. ELECTRONIC FOOTPRINTS. The Marvit brothers are trying to undo the work of engineers before them: All e-mail messages are copied onto every computer they touch to ensure that they aren't lost. But messages pass through several computers, including multiple servers and backup machines, as they travel from sender to recipient, leaving an electronic imprint on each. So even if sender and recipient delete their message, several other copies will continue to exist. Disappearing e-mail doesn't exactly erase the trail. Instead, it encrypts messages so only the sender and recipient can read them. The sender can put a time limit on the e-mail, a function the brothers say will also help companies manage the storage of documents for legally specified time periods. Here's how it works: When loaded on a computer hard drive, the software program kicks in automatically as soon as the user hits "send." The software asks for an encryption key from the Disappearing Inc. server. A drop-down menu lets the sender set a time limit for the message, which can range from minutes to months. When that period ends, the message is irretrievably scrambled. For now, the software works only with the Microsoft Outlook e-mail program, but Disappearing Inc. intends to make it available to Lotus users early next year. The software is free to download on the Web, but companies that use Disappearing Email for so-called document retention pay $4 per user per month. HAUNTING WORDS. Some analysts are skeptical that enough companies will think it's worth the trouble. The need to make e-mail unreadable forever is very much a niche market, says Neil MacDonald, an analyst with Gartner, a tech consulting firm. "If you've got something that is really that sensitive, wouldn't it make more sense to use the phone?" he asks. The Marvits contend that it's not just a matter of sensitive messages. Even seemingly harmless missives could come back to haunt a company. Maclen Marvit calls it the "Ken Starr Test," referring to the former independent counsel. And competitors -- like ZixIt's ZixMail or Authentica's MailVault -- only offer encryption while in transit. E-mail messages that remain on servers along the way might eventually be decoded. "It doesn't do anything if Ken Starr shows up. He says, 'Give me the files and the passwords!'" Maclen says by way of dismissing other encryption methods. The idea for Disappearing Inc. came to the brothers after they heard a conference speaker's lament about seemingly indestructible electronic messages. Both soon left their jobs (Maclen was at online advertising company Narrowline, and David was working on Internet strategy at Fujitsu) to launch their company in June, 1999, with $750,000 from Angel Investors, a San Francisco-area incubator. They raised an additional $10 million in January from venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, Calif., and Red Rock Ventures in Palo Alto. CYBER SHREDDER. They'll need more cash -- and hope to raise several million by June, 2001 -- to help their firm market its software. One of its first corporate clients is Ernst & Young, also an investor in Red Rock. The consulting firm is offering Disappearing Email to clients to allow them to destroy e-mail documents as effectively as a shredder handles paper ones. "Our relationship with Disappearing Inc. lets our clients reduce the risks associated with old e-mail messages," says John Janes, senior manager with Ernst & Young's Legal Technology Services. "Helping our customers control their risks is our main priority." The priority for Disappearing Inc. is winning more corporate customers. To that end, the company's board recently brought in a salesman to run the company. Their choice for chairman, president, and CEO: Michael Burkland, a veteran of two other software startups and a former Oracle salesman. Burkland most recently ran Eventus Software, which made programs to manage Web content and was acquired by Segue in 1998. Explains Marvit, who gave up the CEO spot to Burkland: "Startups need to go through phases. It was very important for this company to have strong technological leadership in its beginning phase, but we've reached the time for a shift." Part of Burkland's plan includes building more alliances similar to the one with Ernst & Young, as well as targeting companies that want to keep documents only for designated periods. For the world's largest corporations, "the everlasting quality of e-mail is becoming more and more of a problem all the time," insists Burkland. He'll have to convince them that Disappearing Email is the answer -- or risk the company's own disappearing act. Jeanette Brown covers e-business for Business Week in New York |
