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Gmail's Undo Send lets you recall your temper tantrums, no harm done
Remember that time you hit the "Send" button, and suddenly changed your mind, frantically clicking and closing stuff on your desktop in a futile attempt to stop your fiery diatribe? Funny how clicking one final button focuses the mind, after it's too late. Now those clever Gmail programmers have a little routine that fixes that, giving us "Undo Send," a Google Labs setting that lets you call back your emails. We've loaded it and tried it out for you.
After a quick enabling of the feature on the Gmail Labs Settings page, there it appears just after you send a message: Undo. And hey, it works perfectly. There's a catch, though — you can only recall an email for about five seconds. But this is a whole lot better than nothing. Thanks, Google! Now go figure out how to recall email messages 24 hours later and erase all memory of them.
Gmail users, find the experimental feature here, almost at the bottom of the page, and don't forget to click "Save Changes."
Via Lifehacker and Obsessable
By 7 at 3:37 AM ON 03/21/09
Gmail's language should be set to English (US), so the Labs tab comes visible.
By xanapus at 2:45 PM ON 03/21/09
AOL had that feature in 1997 when I first started using it but it was limited to emails to other AOL email addresses. I don't think that 5 seconds really makes a huge difference because I'm usually reading emails right away. That is unless they hold emails for 5 seconds before sending them off.
Usually when I send email like that I keep it on my screen and read it a few times then delete it. Just typing the words out helps but you don't have to twist the knife any further lol.
By freelanc3r at 6:25 PM ON 03/21/09
It's a great concept, though I'm think that google could have just had easily incorporated the undo send with the draft function and Microsoft's Manual Check/Send Mail button.
When enabled, the send button actually puts the the e-mail in the outbox for a number of minutes or seconds determined in the set up screen for "Undo Send", after the time period expires, the e-mail is sent. An additional button could be added that says "Send Mail Now" that bypasses the undo option for those e-mails that have to be sent now, the two buttons would be on opposite ends of the bar, and if you undo the send, the e-mail is taken out of the outbox and plopped into the draft been for further action.
What's better is with that method, google doesn't use up their servers, instead it's the user's storage space that's utilized, so truthfully nothing new is really created.
By julia at 9:02 PM ON 04/01/09
But I don't know name of this application in google lab. So I can't test it. Who known tell me?
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julia:
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