I find that some of my best email editing work happens in the nano-second following the moment I hit send. Sound familiar? Forgotten attachments, poor grammar, spelling mistakes, negative tone, left out recipients and other errors amazingly jump right off the page once it is too late to do anything about it.
Good news. Gmail has added an unsend function which provides you 5 seconds to “take it back.” While this does not give the ability to take back what you sent beyond the 5 second window, I find that typically 5 seconds is more than enough time to pull back an “oh no!” mistake message. If you are a Gmail user, just go to the labs section in settings to enable this very useful functionality. While you are there consider enabling the “forgotten attachment detector” too. This scans your messages for word like attached and then notifies you if nothing is actually attached to the message.
Hopefully this will help you to not say something to someone.
I thought they added those 5 seconds just for me! As soon as I saw that function, I added it — love ‘undo’. In theory — because, of course, now that I have it, I haven’t had to use it.…
Thanks David! I use Gmail everyday and had heard about this feature but not enabled, which I just did along with the “forgotten asttachement detector” — I really need that one!
I really admire Google’s focus on making all of their products and services better for the user and their ability to do so. Sometimes they annoy me with some of their various policies, but it is amazing when you consider the constant innovations they produce in so many areas.