Microsoft's new IRM, and how to deal with it in Outlook

Microsoft has intro­duced IRM — Infor­ma­tion Rights Man­age­ment. If you have received email sent from a com­puter that was "IRMed", but yours isn't, there is a solution.

Microsoft's new Infor­ma­tion Rights Man­age­ment soft­ware in Office 2003 will only let approved users open Out­look email mes­sages which are "IRMed" and allow users to set an expiry date after which their mes­sages will die.

Effec­tively, this is con­gru­ous to hav­ing an "auto shred­der" ser­vice for email.
Rather handy for busi­ness use, but if you read the fine print you find out that:

1. This is a subscription-based ser­vice, so if you use it you will be locked into pay­ing Microsoft for ever after.
2. The only email soft­ware that will be able to read "IRMed" mes­saged so far will be Out­look 2003 — and there are not even plans to make rights man­age­ment work on the Mac.

What do you think might hap­pen if this proves pop­u­lar? For one thing, it might result in a sit­u­a­tion where it's a lot of has­sle for non-Outlook email users to receive Out­look email and/or where peo­ple using Out­look end up hav­ing to remem­ber who in their address book has Out­look and who doesn't.

For another, even for peo­ple who DO use Out­look but do not have IRM capa­bi­il­ties installed (given that they are not free to begin with) it may be a prob­lem to receive "IRMed" email. There is a fix though, if you use Office down­load the update from Office Update web­site.