Gadgetopia

Yesterday on Kim Komando’s radio show, they had some adverts about BigString.com, an e-mail service that makes some pretty astounding claims about messages sent using a BigString account:

Recallable Email, which can be erased, edited, recalled or even have attachments and images “swapped out.”

Self-Destructing Email. Don’t let your email remain in someone else’s inbox forever! With this feature you can set a time limit on your email.

Self-Destructing Pictures. Don’t let your photo remain in someone else’s inbox forever! With this feature you can set a time limit on your email. You can even control how many times you want the recipient to view your photo before it Self-Destructs.

Non-Printable Email. Send emails that are very difficult to print. Works on photos too!

“When Opened” Report. Know for certain whether or not your email was read. You will even know the exact day and time it was read.

They have three levels of service — a free account, limited to 20 outbound messages a month, BigString Plus ($17.95 a month), which allows 300 messages a month, and BigString Premium ($29.95 a month), with unlimited messages. There is also a business plan where all of your domain’s messages will go through BigString’s servers.

I was curious, so I signed up for a freebie. Quite underwhelming. When you send a message to someone, all they get is a standard message in their inbox with a couple of http links. Clicking on those links open a web page, which I would imagine shows the message. But the service doesn’t appear to be very Mac friendly, as the linked messages won’t open in Safari, Mozilla or Internet Exploder.

So I guess that’s it for my testing of the system. Anybody else try it and want to share your experiences, or want to sign up, give it a run and report back?