You know that feeling you get right after you push send on an email bitching out your boyfriend for not putting the toilet seat down and you call him a ninny-muggins and tell him it’s over? You realize as you’re pressing send you shouldn’t have sent that? Well gmail has just introduced “undo send” as part of their ever expanding lab tools. After you send a message that wasn’t ready or you shouldn’t have sent in the first place, just click “undo” and gmail will grab the message and put it right back in the “compose” window.
How is this possible? Once something is sent, it is sent right? Well, yes. This trick doesn’t really grab an already sent email and magically bring it back. It just holds all sent messages in a queue for five full seconds before sending them. Which should be more than enough time for you to feel the pang of regret and hit the panic button to tell gmail not to send the message after all.
Leave it to Google to constantly come up with good, innovative ideas. More details on the undo feature can be found on the gmail blog
This discussion currently has 3 responses.
March 19, 2009
I was just thinking, like, yesterday that an “undo send” button option would be awesome on email. Of course, Google read my mind again.
Um, not that I actually sent an email yesterday I regretted. But for some reason I was thinking of email improvements.
March 19, 2009
Retracting an email has been possible in Outlook for a few versions. Sadly, it only works if the received hasn’t read the email (or at least that’s how it used to work).
March 20, 2009
5 seconds isn’t quite enough if you are inebriated… but not a bad idea…