Google Is Working On an 'Undo Send' Email Feature for Inbox

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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It’s a good bet that every one of us have at one time or another send off an email only to wish you could get it back and pretend it never happened. Google is taking this idea and running with it. The Google team forecasts the new undo send feature will be added into the next-generation Gmail.

The feature should save users a bit of embarrassment when it comes to sending an email to the wrong person, with the wrong information or something even worse.
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I love that feature in my corporate email. I wonder if Google's solution will work with non-Gmail servers too. Doubtful but would be glorious if they figured out a way to standardize message recall on webmail.
 
There's already something which does something similar built in to Google mail. It just delays sending for a short while so if you want to cancel the email it just doesn't get sent.
 
oh the unethical consequences this might bring up...but hey if it stops drunk emails or wrong recipient emails YAY
 
This will be a great way for Google to mine information about what it is you regret saying to others and who you regret saying it to. Totally a good feature to get a little more of a peek inside your head to figure out what kinds of products you'll wanna buy. Also, even though the recipient doesn't see it, it's gonna sit around in a Google data warehouse for like a trillion years.
 
AOL had this feature back in 1993. If they hadn't read the email, you could unsend it. FFS Google, reinvent the wheel while your at it.
 
Kritter said:
AOL had this feature back in 1993. If they hadn't read the email, you could unsend it. FFS Google, reinvent the wheel while your at it.
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It can only unsend within its own ecosystem or other services which reciprocate and offer it too. Outside destinations would only use the delayed send system.

Once read it couldn't be unsent. Not only could people defeat the recall anyway if they wanted to, you could have people make grievous threats and erase the evidence.
 
they have a labs feature that does this already right? im pretty sure i can undo send on my gmail.
 
The feature won't and can't work beyond a provider's own mail services and servers. Even usenet cancel requests aren't honored on most servers these days, and I'm unaware of anyone other than Google talking about a standardized recall function for email. It would be a logistical (and even legal) nightmare.
 
I've had 'Undo Send' in Gmail for so long, I thought it was a regular feature by now. (I enabled it when Google Labs 1st introduced it). I use it occasionally when it would save me a follow up email to correct or add a detail.
 
Terry Olaes said:
I love that feature in my corporate email.
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The trouble is when DEU's (dumb end users) love it too. In my netadmin days, I definitely had my share of execs and secretaries that couldn't understand why the "Recall this message" feature in Outlook didn't work for the boneheaded email they just sent out to a bunch of internet addresses when they hit Reply All instead of Reply with something they believed was confidential to their boss.

"You don't understand I am going to get fired if you can't make the Recall work". :facedesk:
 
Now they just need to work on designers who can see colors other than white and crayola.
 
so how does it work? will it remove the email from the recipient's mail box?... cuz gmail to gmail is instant. There's no time to undo
 
The only way this would work that I can figure; is if that if all of the emails that are sent from G-mail would only be able to be viewed through a G-mail secure server. Thus anyone that sends an email to a non-gmail account would be linked to a page that contains the email saved on their servers. Thus they can terminate the link upon un-send.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
This will be a great way for Google to mine information about what it is you regret saying to others and who you regret saying it to. Totally a good feature to get a little more of a peek inside your head to figure out what kinds of products you'll wanna buy. Also, even though the recipient doesn't see it, it's gonna sit around in a Google data warehouse for like a trillion years.
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That's very true, although there are other concerns along the lines of spammers and scammers. It's likely why Google has been working on it for a while before putting it into beta. For example, let's say they allow you an hour to recall the email as long as it hasn't been read. Spammers could send out their emails and wait 59 minutes and then see who has read it. They could then send only to those that have and see which ones blocked their message (unless Google implements something to derail this, which likely they have anticipated). The irony is that Google could use this data to help with their own advertising! It's definitely more complex of an issue than it seems on the surface, keeping in mind it is likely there will be a finite limit and any such limit can be abused in various ways.
 
This should actually be a standard in the email protocol. If someone has leverage to make that change it would probably be Google. Of course each server would have to honor it.

Email is a messed up protocol though, SMTP and POP3/IMAP should all be part of the same daemon and be a single protocol. The fact that they are separate would make this implementation a bit harder to make as a standard.
 
Recall protocols only work in masking the sent email, you don't reverse the action. If someone wanted to see the original is very possible to see it even if it wasn't already read, or if you aren't accepting the recall commands. This is purely for the average consumer, I doubt this is an attempt to get gmail on the corporate servers.
 
Trimlock said:
Recall protocols only work in masking the sent email, you don't reverse the action. If someone wanted to see the original is very possible to see it even if it wasn't already read, or if you aren't accepting the recall commands. This is purely for the average consumer, I doubt this is an attempt to get gmail on the corporate servers.
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As someone else mentioned the idea is nothing new, e.g. AOL had recall (between members) for at least 10 years. It works as long as both sender and recipient are within a single domain, beyond it the function is useless. As it should be imo, e.g. what happens when hackers figure out how to send recall requests? Nobody will know exactly what emails were delivered and which were not. Legal nightmare on top of practical.
 
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