To reduce this carbon footprint, a group of French experts decided to act, and looked for ideas:

Jonathan Loriaux, CEO and founder of Badsender came up with the idea of making emails expire, or self-destruct. The sender say when the email expires, the MailBox Providers ease the deletion process for the recipients.
Benjamin Billon, Compliance and Deliverability Director at Splio wanted to do something as well. In 2019, he met with the Shift Project to discuss this topic.

This idea may humbly change the email world: it will help MailBox providers to give us ways to clean up our emails, for example with an expired emails folder, which we could clean with a single click.

Helping email users and MailBox providers to have a lower carbon footprint does not mean we don’t have to change our behaviors. In email, like in many other human activities, we often act as if everything is unlimited. Climate change should make us change our mindset towards digital sufficiency, and ultimately optimize and minimize our technology usage. This is true for many topics, including email.

By the way, deleting our emails does not mean we don't have to reduce our carbon footprint by eating less meat and preferring the train to the plane in our travels. Every action matters.

In 2019, Jonathan launched the Zero Carbon email website and began communicating about it in the email marketing sector.

Two years later, the email expiration idea emerged from Jonathan.

The same year, Benjamin submitted a draft to the Internet Engineering Task Force, to propose a very simple solution to make email expire: adding an expiration date technical header in the emails sent, so the Mail Box Provider on the receiving side could help users to delete messages that became useless over time.

Mission: Impossible - Your marketing email will self-destruct in x days - Dec. 2023

In a few words