Get Out of Trouble With Gmail's New "Undo Send" Feature

[Lisa Hoover]

The folks over at Gmail have been busy rolling out all sorts of new features in the last few months but the one they dropped on users today is by far my favorite -- Undo Send.

I don't know a single person who hasn't had the gut-wrenching experience of typing up an email, hitting send, and then realizing you've made a gigantic error. You know the kind: an off-color joke accidentally forwarded to your boss, something written in a fit of anger that should never be read, or an embarassing photo of you at the company picnic wearing a propeller hat. In fact, according to a recent survey, a full 87% of executives say they they've sent or received an email in error.

Google feels our pain. Fire up Gmail, click on Google Labs, and enable this fantastic new feature. If you need to use this panic button, you'd better act quick -- you only have about five seconds to undo send before your email slides into the ether and out of reach. Now if you accidentally send your mother a racy email meant for your spouse you have no one to blame but yourself.

[NicAx64]

cool feature.

This should be about the gmail web based mail client. What about other mail clients ? Shuch as Outlook and Thunderbird , then they have to implement this feature on their client application side.

But this will break the original pop3 specification.

[airbourne]

I've actually had to train myself to not put in any recipients of an email until after I have composed it due to a couple of early clicks or an accidental keystroke sending of an email (CTRL-S instead of say CTRL-D).

Though I am skeptical that a feature like this would be useful even if it is a welcome addition. This is mostly because you only have about 5 seconds to rescind. Maybe if it was 30 seconds because sometimes it can take longer than 5 seconds to refresh a page on an older computer.

[jephthah]

5 seconds? well, excuse me if i don't fall all over myself with enthusiasm.

they should make it indefinite, that you can recall any email at any time, so long as someone hasnt already accessed it.

[altf2junkie]

In response to what Jephthah said:

That would be a great feature, but it would also involve basically hacking into the recipients' email accounts, something that even Google is not prepared to license. =)