“Recalling” a sent e-mail
What have I done?
Do you sometimes regret sending an angry e-mail ten seconds later? Or have you ever e-mailed the wrong price quote to a customer or the right price quote to the wrong customer? Or did your poor joke end up with the wrong person? Here are some tips for avoiding such embarrassing situations in the future.
Prevention in Outlook
Microsoft Outlook users can create a rule which tells the program to keep e-mails in your Outbox for a while before actually sending them. How this rule should be composed depends on the Outlook version you’re using, but the following guidelines will probably help:
- in the Tools menu go to Rules and Alerts
- select New Rule, then Start from a blank rule and then Check messages after sending
- click on the Next button twice, and Outlook will ask you whether this rule should be applied to all outgoing messages. Confirm by clicking on Yes
- in the new menu that appears, select the Defer delivery by a number of minutes option
- in the lower window, click on anumber and set the time (between one and 120 minutes)
- Click one final time on Next and then on Finish.
From now on, all outgoing e-mails will be kept in your Outbox for thenumber of minutes you’ve specified before they are actually sent.
Note. If you try to send a message just before shutting down your computer, it may not be sent - but fortunately Outlook will alert you of this. Tip. To prevent this, you could configure an exception to the rule in the last step of the above instructions, for instance for outgoing e-mails marked as “high priority” or containing the word “urgent”.
Too late?
If your e-mail has already gone, and if you and the recipient use the same Microsoft Exchange server (e.g. within your corporate network), you may be able to recall the message before the recipient opens it. Go to Sent Items immediately, select the message concerned and in the Actions menu click on Recall this Message. Here again, the procedure may differ according to the Outlook version you’re using. It’s therefore best to surf to the Microsoft site (http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb) and search for recall message. This will return the instructions for versions 2003 and 2007. Tip. These instructions will also tell you in which cases this trick won’t work.
Prevention in Gmail
If you use Gmail (http://www.gmail.com), you can also set a cancellation period. Here’s how:
- at the top right, click on Settings and select the Labs option from the menu
- scroll down to Undo Send and click on Enable. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save Changes
- now go to Settings again and choose Mail Settings. Specify the cancellation period (between ten and 30 seconds only!) and at the bottom click on Save Changes.
When you now send a message from Gmail, the Undo option will appear at the top. Note. As you have to cancel your e-mail within 30 seconds, there’s not much time to think things over.
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