Email expiration date

We need money to complete this project

Empowering the email industry

"It's the emailers who have to solve the problems they themselves have created, not the citizens."
Jonathan Loriaux
Badsender

This project aims to reduce carbon footprint in the emailing sector*, fromlighten the mental load Internet users and transforming culture and attitudes to email use.

Billions of commercial emails are sent by organizations every year, and stored indefinitely, for nothing, in data centers around the world. This project aims to reduce the growing volume of these useless messages.

*We are well aware that email is only a small part of digital carbon emissions, which are themselves a small part of global carbon emissions. But the effort must come from every sector. So let's do our bit.

#New stories

What will it be like?

1.

The sender defines an expiration date for its message. This is the date at which the email is no longer required.

2.

The email tool allows the expiry date to be entered when creating a campaign, just like an object.

3.

The messaging provider can read and process the expiration date of incoming emails.

4.

The messaging provider introduces a new cleaning feature based on expiration information.

Over 120 companies have given us their support!

In two years, over 120 companies have given us their support. These include advertisers, messaging providers, marketing platforms and agencies. From the outset, we felt that this initiative was a no-brainer. and met a real need for both web users and advertisers.

March 2021

First publication of the proposal Jonathan Loriaux on the Badsender blog.

Creation of the ZeroCarbonEmail website to host the expiration date project.

April 2021

October 2021

Creation of a technical working group led by Benjamin Billon, ANSSI (Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information).

First publication of a draft technical specification standard by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).

.

December 2021

February 2022

Second publication of the draft standard.

Third publication of the draft standard.

March 2022

June 2022

A number of advertisers from different business sectors met in 3 workshops to work on expiry date use cases.

A successful test was carried out by SNCF Connect (French railways) in Adobe Campaign Classic.

September 2022

May 11, 2023

Final publication of a draft standard at the IETF. For insiders, you can find this work here : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-billon-expires. This means that right now, even in its draft form, the expiry date project has sufficient legitimacy to be implemented in e-mail solutions and messaging systems.

Publication of a analysis of greenhouse gas emission gains expiration dates in emails

December 2023

Expiration dates are already available in some email solutions

There's still a long way to go, but together we can get there.

"It's clearly more of a marathon than a sprint."
Benjamin Billon
French National Agency for Information Systems Security

All these advances are remarkable! However, in this ambitious project aimed at transforming culture and technology, it is only not easy to progress quickly.

A number of people have devoted time (sometimes considerable) to it, but non-profit projects in the corporate world are hard to move. They are rarely the priority, yet we firmly believe in transforming email piping to make it more sober.

#New stories

At this stage, we need :

1. Shippers

That shippers set expiration dates in their routing tool whenever possible.

2. Sending tools

More emailing tools include expiry date in the "Expires" field of the SMTP header of each email sent.

3. Messaging

That messengers read and finally process the expiry date.

To achieve this, we need to take the email players by the hand!

Each player waits for the other to move. A vicious circle.

Shippers don't move because they can't enter an expiry date in their tool, or they simply don't know what the field is for.

Messenger services are holding back because they're waiting to see if there's a craze or not. Dealing with the expiration date represents a development cost to be prioritized in their roadmap. 

o

Sending tools are not moving, as this data field is not yet massively in demand by their customers (the shippers).

We need an advocacy manager

We need prove to each email player that the others want to move.

Jonathan Loriaux wants to put his expertise to good use and his ability to mobilize resources in collaboration with the Badsender team. He will devote an average of one day a week to the project for the next two years.

Badsender cannot bear the costs of this project alone. We have need to raise funds to speed up the process and make the project a reality.

Support packages

Badsender will devote 1 day a week to advocacy work, i.e. 45 days a year (taking into account vacations and absences)for an annual cost of 45,000 euros. We estimate that it will take at least another 2 years of work.

Manager

5000 per year
  • Mention of your company name on all Badsender blog posts
  • Mention of your company name on the ZeroCarbonEmail home page as a "paid" supporter
  • Mention of your company name in a dedicated block on our Badsender newsletter
  • Mention your company name in a LinkedIn post
  • Your company name in the introduction to Badsender lives
  • Mention of your company name at the end of our 2 podcasts Badsender and Sobriété & Marketing
  • Member of the Project Oversight Committee

Convinced

10000 per year
  • Mention of your company name on all Badsender blog posts
  • Mention of your company name on the ZeroCarbonEmail home page as a "paid" supporter
  • Mention of your company name in a dedicated block on our Badsender newsletter
  • Mention your company name in a LinkedIn post
  • Your company name in the introduction to Badsender lives
  • Mention of your company name at the end of our 2 podcasts Badsender and Sobriété & Marketing
  • Member of the Project Oversight Committee

Committed

15000 per year
  • Mention of your company name on all Badsender blog posts
  • Mention of your company name on the ZeroCarbonEmail home page as a "paid" supporter
  • Mention of your company name in a dedicated block on our Badsender newsletter
  • Mention your company name in a LinkedIn post
  • Your company name in the introduction to Badsender lives
  • Mention of your company name at the end of our 2 podcasts Badsender and Sobriété & Marketing
  • Member of the Project Oversight Committee

Support the "Email Expiration Date" initiative

Join our official supporters and, together, let's make the email industry take responsibility for the climate emergency!

The advocacy officer's missions

Motivate routers and messaging services to invest in the subject

  • Lobbying: maintaining contact with the various players, organizing project presentations, establishing contacts...
  • Design of proposed implementations of expiration date functionalities in campaign management tools and messaging solutions: wireframes, structure of specifications...

Motivate routers and messaging services to invest in the subject

  • Update benchmark of emails sent with expiration dates
  • Documentation of the implementation of expiration dates in the various campaign management tools
  • Helping advertisers set up expiration dates

Communicating the project

  • Regular publication of project news (benchmark developments, new implementations, new support...)
  • Bringing together the various players
  • Community animation

Creating a legal and administrative framework

  • Creation of a charter to be signed by all supporters
  • Creation of a confidentiality charter with advertisers and ESPs contributing to the benchmark
  • Publication of governance reports
  • Validation of the expiry date concept in local legislation (secrecy of correspondence, ...)

Our commitments

We will publish it transparently on a section of our website: