Our emails aren’t always as well-thought-out, as accurately typed, or as succinct as we would like them to be, and that’s before you consider problems like sending emails without intended attachments and typing the wrong person’s address. If this happens to you often and you’re not familiar with the “undo send” feature, now’s the time to learn.
How to unsend an email in Gmail
A feature called Undo Send is built right into Gmail, and it works without you having to turn it on. Whenever you send a message, you’ll see an Undo link in the bottom left corner of the screen. If you tap on it, you’ll be able to bring your email back as a draft.
A feature called Undo Send is built right into Gmail, and it works without you having to turn it on. Whenever you send a message, you’ll see an Undo link in the bottom left corner of the screen. If you tap on it, you’ll be able to bring your email back as a draft.
You can set the amount of time you’ve got before the email can’t be recovered anymore. From Gmail’s web interface, click the cog icon (top right), then choose See all settings. Go to the General tab and you’ll see an Undo Send drop-down menu. There, you can choose from a time period of five (the default), 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Gmail will apply this choice across the web and mobile.
Emails you bring back will pop back into the compose window and appear as if you’d never sent them. You can save them as drafts while you mull over your response, send them again, or delete them completely.
How to unsend an email in Outlook
The Mail app that comes preinstalled with Windows doesn’t have an undo send feature, but one is available in the free Outlook web client. You can set up a similar feature in the paid-for Outlook desktop app too, but it’s a bit more involved.
The Mail app that comes preinstalled with Windows doesn’t have an undo send feature, but one is available in the free Outlook web client. You can set up a similar feature in the paid-for Outlook desktop app too, but it’s a bit more involved.
On Outlook’s web platform, click the cog icon (top right), choose View all Outlook settings, then Compose and reply. Use the Undo send slider to set up the window of time you’ve got for bringing the message back, from zero to 10 seconds (zero effectively disables the feature).
After you’ve sent a message on the web, click Undo at the bottom. This stops the message from being sent and returns it to draft status.
The desktop version of Outlook doesn’t have a simple undo send feature, but you can set a rule to delay every message you send. From the File tab, click Manage Rules & Alerts, then New Rule. Choose Apply rule on messages I send, then click Next twice, and Yes to confirm. You’ll reach a dialog box where you can click Defer delivery by a number of minutes. Check the box next to this rule, then click the link underneath to set how many minutes the delay should be, you can go from one to 120. Click through the wizard’s remaining screens to set the rule.
Any emails you send from Outlook from then on will sit in the Outbox folder for the specified number of minutes. If you want to cancel a sent message before the delay runs out, you’ll need to drag it back into the Drafts folder.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to undo the sending of emails in the Outlook apps for Android and iOS. If you want to be able to bring back your messages you’ll need to use the website or the desktop application.
Credit: popsci.com
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