What is the deal with Expiring emails

Charles Sauthier, Head of Data Engineering & MarTech, Groupe SeLoger

An all new attempt to bring expiry dates to email exists and is gaining support. Driven primarily with a view to reducing the carbon footprint of digital marketing efforts. Learn about the zerocarbon.email project from Charles Sauthier of Groupe LeSoger. Learn why as someone who send billions of messages every month for brands he supports the proposed new expiring email standard.

From the project description of the projects history:

The evidence is clear, a significant portion of emails become obsolete within days of their reception by recipients. Think of those promotions that are only valid for a few days, those newsletters whose news will almost already be outdated by the time they are received, … These emails take up space in data centers, consume energy for storage (storage device production, usage, end-of-life recycling, …).

In order to reduce the carbon footprint of these emails, they should be deleted, and deleted promptly after receipt. And in order not to put this responsibility on the recipient, why shouldn’t the senders indicate when their emails become obsolete. That’s the point of expiration dates.

In practice, at the time of sending, the sender will define when their message will become obsolete. The ESPs will take care of transmitting the information to the recipient’s mailbox. And the messaging solution will offer the recipients mechanics to more or less automatically delete these emails (with their consent of course).

To achieve this, we need the involvement of the entire email delivery chain: senders, ESPs and ISPs/webmails. If the technical solution is not currently defined, it is not the one that will be complicated to design.The real challenge is the adoption, a massive adoption of all the players in order to make this idea a reality.