Gmail has extended its confidential mode, a feature that lets emails self-destruct, as some headline writers put it, to Android and iOS.

“Confidential mode is now available on mobile devices and can help you protect sensitive information from unauthorized access,” Gmail tweeted on Wednesday.

Gmail says on its website site: “You can use confidential mode to set an expiration date for messages or revoke access at any time. Recipients of the confidential message will have options to forward, copy, print, and download disabled.”

When the confidential mode was announced earlier this year, it drew mixed reviews from email practitioners.

The feature would help “when we send proposals in a sales organization that we don’t want to be outside of their network or their world,” said Brady Edwards, director of customer solutions at email deliverability company 250ok.  

In addition, email marketers may use the confidential mode when sending short-term promotional offers. deadlines. But there are potential downsides.

For one thing, emails sent via Microsoft or Yahoo Mail will not have these same capabilities at this point.

“Once it’s outside their walls, it’s going to be nearly impossible to control how and what the platform does with the message,” Edwards said.

Len Shneyder, VP of Industry relations at SendGrid, also felt that “self-destructive emails really will only work within the Google universe. Once an email is sent it’s really quite impossible to claw it back or force a receiving MUA to delete it from a user’s inbox.”

However, he added, ““Having an option to ‘delete’ or make an email vanish, regardless of it being a time sensitive message/offer/invite is a great way to minimize footprint and clutter.”