How do I unsend E-mail with Gmail?

4 minutes, it’s too late.

In the future, go to Settings> Labs> Enable Undo Send. Then, every time you send something, there’ll be a little message that you can click on for a few seconds after you send that will “undo” it. (Which, doesn’t really undo anything, it just delays sending by a few seconds).

Yeah… Wow you would think by 2012 we’d have the ability to delete?

@whitecarnations Yeah, but then emails would have to wait for as long as you wanted the chance to unsend them to be sent, don’t you get that? The whole point of it being email is that you click and they get it a few minutes, if not seconds later. How do you delete something that has passed through dozens of servers and routers, cahces and history files and already is there?

It’s Pandora’s Box. You have to treat e-mail the same way you would a phone call or a face-to-face conversation; no rewind, no “undo”.

“By 2012”... we want our emails to arrive at their destinations faster, not slower. Therefore, it’s impossible to do what you are asking. To ask for an “unsend” is actually to ask for a delay before the email is sent. People won’t put up with that in this day and age.

But you can train yourself never, ever to click Send without double-checking the To line and the Cc line.

And if you’re writing an e-mail in a state of agitation, you can learn the habit of filling in the To line last, or preceding it with x’s until you’re sure, or addressing it to yourself, so that it can’t slip out of your fingers without your review.

I learned these habits after a mistaken Send of a reply that was meant to be a behind-the-hand whispered forward to a friend. Instead, the person I was talking about got my unfavorable and not at all diplomatically worded comments straight from me. Happened to be a division manager of the company I worked for. Mistake you don’t make twice.

you want tv with a time delay to edit out the bad bits. google offers 30 seconds. Maybe you can figure out a way to program your own email to do better [you have to hit send twice or you can set delay of up to 5 minutes etc]

@Jeruba “you can learn the habit of filling in the To line last”

Excellent advice – I do this, too. Never had that happen to me, but I am very paranoid about it!

@anartist Gmail actually has a feature for that (a drunk filter); they call it “Mail Goggles”.

There is a google labs thing which postpones it for 10 seconds or so with an undo link at the top of the screen, I never use it but it is there.

I have a Gmail account for occasional use, but most of my personal e-mail goes through a Eudora client like the one I used to have at work. I never enable instant send. Instead, things park in my outbox with a ‘sendable’ status, and they sit there until I choose to send mail. The number of times this simple two-step process has saved my neck goes far beyond counting.

Typically I let several messages stack up, for minutes or even hours. Before clicking ‘Send Queued Messages’, I go look at the outbox, and sometimes I reopen and recheck messages even though I just finished them. I can’t tell you how many times I have shakily corrected a wrong address or thought better of the content of a message. A few extra seconds for a safeguard is a thousand times better than regrets, embarrassment, and amends.

@dappled_leaves Facebook had that feature, Myspace had that feature. Your logic is flawed. Just because we want e-mail sent faster, it doesn’t negate the fact that there can easily be a feature where you can delete a sent message. Anyways, I’m over it, it doesn’t exist at the moment besides labs mini unsend if you do it fast enough mode.

And you are continuing to misunderstand what the word “sent” means.

@whitecarnations Facebook doesn’t have that feature…. Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?

@whitecarnations In case you don’t quite grasp the concept yet, and it seems you don’t, an facebook or myspace message is not an email! They are managed by one program, one set of servers, and one company. Emails go into different clients, domains, and email managers. Why don’t you try and get YaHoo and Google to work together? That’s why it isn’t possible.

The only way to “undo” an email is to reach into your friends’ brains and erase the neurons that contain the memory of your email…

I do not know of a way to do it with Gmail after the grace period.

Years ago we had a version of Outlook at our office that allowed the sender to “Recall” sent email. You could pull a message back if it was still in the recipient’s Inbox and had not been read. If I recall correctly, if the email had been opened but was still in the Inbox, it was still removed. However it was replaced with a note stating the message has been recalled.
I see this feature is in Outlook 2010 also.

years ago we had a version of Outlook at our office that allowed the sender to “Recall” sent email

That works only when the sender and receiver are on the same Microsoft Exchange mail server – internal company email, or at least both sides must be using Microsoft Exchange, and the receiving server must be set to obey outside recall requests.

Just like how you can’t run and jump into the post office mail bins to search for a piece of mail you sent off two days ago that you regret, you can’t easily unsend messages like that, by the time you’ve sent it it’s gone to dozens of intermediary servers that google has no control over by that point.

When AOL used to offer this feature, it was when they could control both the sending and receiving email addresses, so for them it was as easy as plucking it out of their inbox because it was all in their own system. Google Lab’s undo option is just a send delay. It doesn’t send your message immediately just in case you realize you screwed it up, but after that time limit is up, it’s sent and permanently gone as well.

That Recall feature in Outlook was a laugh. When someone tried to recall a message, recipients would get a message notifying them “X wishes to recall a message,” and you had to click to allow it. Who wouldn’t read it first, especially in a corporate setting?—now, really.