Recently, Google released the new version of Gmail. This new Gmail version is not available for all users yet as Google releases it gradually. To check if this new version has been available for your account you can check it by clicking the gear icon on the upper right corner.

One of the new features offered by the new version of Gmail is Confidential Mode. As the name suggests, this feature allows you to send an email on a confidential mode. If you turn this mode on when sending an email, your recipient(s) will not be able to forward the email contents, copy/paste, download, now print.

Two security features offered by Gmail through the Confidential Mode: expiration date and SMS passcode. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the SMS passcode is not available in all countries yet. Big question regarding the Confidential Mode of Gmail, what happen when you send a Gmail message on the Confidential Mode?

When you send a Gmail message on the Confidential Mode, your recipient(s) won’t be able to view the email contents right away. Instead, they will be prompted to click a button as follow.

Once your recipients clicked the button, they will be redirected to a new page on a new tab on your browser. On other words, they will not read the message you sent on the Gmail dashboard.

Gmail will then delete the message you sent once it reached the expiration date. This feature is pretty useful if you want to send a sensitive email. Unfortunately, this feature works only on Gmail accounts — be it free Gmail accounts (gmail.com) or Gmail accounts on G Suite (custom domain). When I tried the Confidential Mode to send a message to a Yahoo account, the message was not sent.