Emails that delete themselves
Promotional emails sit in inboxes long after the offer has ended, and storing them has a carbon cost. This tool removes them.
- Client
- VML, WPP and AWS
- Sector
- Marketing and advertising
- When
- 2024
- Delivered with
- Slalom
- My role
- Led the design and experience team
- Innovation Bronze, Cannes Lions 2024
- Predicted to delete 219.2 billion emails in its first year
- Predicted to cut 6,500 tonnes of CO2 in its first year
An expired promotional email is still stored somewhere, and storage uses energy. Multiplied across every inbox, that is a real footprint.
Vanishing Emails is a tool built on AWS that identifies promotional emails once they are out of date and deletes them automatically.
What I did
I led the design and experience team at Slalom, working with VML, WPP and AWS.
We started with research into how people manage their inboxes. From that we produced the journey map, the app flow and the first version of the landing page, then prototyped and tested with the engineering team.
The original concept artwork, from the landing page to the social and outdoor ads, was made under the working name Expiring Emails. The brand came later, along with the rename to Vanishing Emails.
The hard part
The tool had to find and delete expired promotions without asking much of the user and without compromising their privacy. It also had to work across different email platforms.
Emails are identified by sender, subject line and content pattern. We explored several ways of doing this with AWS and VML, and chose on privacy and security first.
What happened
The work won an Innovation Bronze at Cannes Lions in 2024.