Note retention
Any note you create on Dead Drop lasts for 24 hours*, or until its unique link is used to read it, whichever is shorter.
Once a note has been viewed, its content is blanked out so that it can't be viewed again, and the note content is gone forever. The records for all notes are deleted 24 hours after their creation, whether they've been read or not. This ensures that notes are always ephemeral. We retain note records, even blanked out ones, for 24 hours after creation so that, should someone misuse Dead Drop (for example to send unsolicited or malicious content), we can still identify the IP address that created the note, after the note itself has been deleted, and ban the creator's IP if we receive complaints.
* After 24 hours the note is considered ready for deletion. It does not get deleted immediately; an hourly scan is done to identify and delete notes that are more than 24 hours old. This means it can be up to 25 hours before a note is actually deleted.