Coming soon: self-destructing e-mail? (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

Microsoft has been quiet about the next version of Office, dubbed Office 11 and set to ship in mid-May, but a few media outlets are reporting that the upcoming version of its e-mail program Outlook will allow users to have more control over their e-mail messages. Sources say the upcoming version of Outlook will enable users to decide how long an e-mail message will exist and whether it can be sent to other people or printed out.

This is one of a series of new controls Microsoft is creating that would give users more control over their written words--an important feature in a time when everything from love letters to company secrets is spread across the Internet.

As e-mail begins to play a more critical role in daily decision making, however, historians and archivists fear it will be too easy to permanently delete the memos and letters that could potentially be important evidentiary and/or historical documents. Deleted files can be recovered, but only through special programs and computer forensics.

Microsoft Office contains the programs Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access. Dan Shepherd, a technology specialist in Microsoft's Cleveland office, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the new settings would allow users to determine how others use their e-mails, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and any other files created with a new Office program. Before sending an e-mail, he said, the sender could allow someone to read the e-mail and print it but not forward it to anyone else. Or, after a certain time period, encryption technology would make the message unreadable. In addition, the author of a report created in Microsoft Word could restrict anyone from editing the original work.

Shepherd called the technology a "personalized version" of digital rights management--the buzzword associated with protecting copyrighted material such as music on the Internet. "People will ensure the information they are sending is going to remain confidential with them," he said. "Today, we can say a message is confidential, but there's nothing that enforces that other than your trust in the individual you're sending e-mail to."

Experts say e-mail is much easier to destroy and harder to store than printed pages, and e-mails cannot be catalogued effectively without expensive software. Many states have created or are discussing guidelines that require relevant e-mails to be stored like other public documents. Because auto-destruct settings may increase the loss of information that may be crucial to historians or lawyers, it will be imperative that organizations create policies to manage such tools.