Hands on with Gmail's New 'Undo Send' Feature

[Mark Hensberg]

Hands on with Gmail's New 'Undo Send' Feature

Brennon Slattery, PC World

Sometimes after sending an e-mail, you immediately realize it was a
mistake. You slap your forehead and pray the recipient confuses it for
spam or just thinks you're off your meds. Google understands your
pain, and has introduced an Undo Send feature to Gmail.

Turn Undo Send on in Gmail Labs under the Settings panel of your
Google account. Undo Send is hidden somewhere near the bottom of the
page. Once the feature is enabled, an Undo option appears after you've
sent a message. You have five seconds to click it. Hit it in enough
time and you're good to go. Miss the mark and your acid-laced diatribe
about your boss will see the light of day.

Undo Send functions a lot like Gmail's Mail Goggles feature that was
seemingly made for the purpose of stopping intoxicated lonelyhearts
from drenching exes with professions of love. The difference is that
with Undo Send, you have to be super quick, and it's questionable
whether someone accustomed to sending mistake messages would be fast
enough to stop it.

I tested Undo Send by composing foul-mouthed messages to myself and
then trying to zap them in time. Messages I sent from my Google
account to my Google account appeared instantly and didn't offer me a
chance to delete. But if you send them to an outside address, they
will never arrive at their intended destination. To ensure my test was
failsafe, I sent a bunch of really awful e-mails to friends and family
and zapped those, too. It was quite cathartic.

Undo Send exploits Gmail's relative slowness. Slower e-mail clients --
are you listening, Outlook? -- should take note from today's news from
Google Labs and replace clunky "recall message" options with an undo
button. Gmail's Undo Send works, as long as you're quick with your
regrets.

Undo send is one Gmail Labs feature I don't think I'd ever disable.
The brief delay has never caused me any grief, and I can't recall how
many times I've noticed something that really needed changing after
I'd already clicked the send button. The only downside: you're locked
into Google's time delay.

At least, you were. Head to your Gmail settings tab and you can now
choose 5,10, 20, or 30 seconds as your undo window. 30 seconds should
be more than enough time for even the most gut-wrenching email trigger
pulls -- like telling your boss off or breaking up with a significant
other.

If 30 seconds doesn't seem long enough, you'll probably best off
leaving messages to ferment in the drafts folder anyway. Dang, I've
got some in there from three years ago... I wonder why I started
writing them...