Google Adds Five-Second “Uh-Oh” Delay to Gmail
A small but welcome feature should be in the Labs section if you use Google’s Gmail service. It’s called “Undo Send”, or as I like to call it: the “Uh-Oh” function. Once enabled, you’ll have a five-second window to stop a message from leaving after you hit the Send button. I tested it late last night between my two Gmail accounts and it worked flawlessly.
You do need a good reaction time since you only have five seconds to click the “Undo” button after hitting “Send,” but I like the amount of delay. It’s not too short so as to make the feature unusable, but it’s not long enough to seriously impact your productivity speed.
Ideally, I’m hoping to see a true mail recall feature in the not-too-distant future. That might be challenging for an email system as vast as Gmail. It also could be tricky once mail floats beyond the confines of Google. Why not enable it in small pockets at first?
I’m thinking of starting in Google Apps for Domains accounts, like the one we use here at GigaOM. Any mail sent to the internal GigaOM.com mail accounts would be a great place to start. After that, perhaps it could be applied to any mail sent between two Gmail accounts. It’s not often that I need to do a full recall, but it’s nice to know the feature is there when you need it. For now, I’ll have to hone my skills and hand-eye coordination with “Undo Send.”
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Funny – I have my Outlook set to send/receive every 3 minutes because I can’t count the number of times I have sent something and immediately wanted it back! 5 seconds is not long enough, IMO.
Well, any shorter and you REALLY have to be on the ball. Any longer and the Sending message will sit there and waste more of your time. Five is a good compromise in my opinion. How long would you prefer it to be?
A “true mail recall”? As in you send a message and if the receiver hasn’t opened it yet you can delete it?
While I guess that kind of feature could work inside the confines of a mail system ( and does in some corporate cases ) , once the message has left a system it would require that the receiving system also allow for mail recall.
Currently, email is the same as snail mail. Once your message has left your hands and is in the delivery system, you can’t cancel its delivery.
Certainly it could (and does) work within the same system, i.e.: internal mails in a Microsoft Exchange environment have done this for years. That’s why I made the suggestion that Google do this solely *within* Gmail. Once mail goes from a Gmail to a non-Gmail receipient, I’m in agreement with you about the snail-mail example, but that’s not what I’m recommending.