We’ll all been sitting there at some point. With an important email that you have been sitting and writing.
“Hello! Here comes the invoice… ”or“ Here is the latest draft ”etc. Just when you press send, you realize that you have forgotten to attach the document. Or misspelled or forgot something else. Why – why can you not regret a sent email?!?!
For quite some time now, Google has been offering a solution to this problem in Gmail – but many have missed the feature! Therefore, I thought I would show you exactly how to do it.
This applies to Gmail’s new inbox variant. If you use the old inbox, the function must be activated, I will show it further down in the post.
Immediately after you press the Send button, you will return to the inbox. A small gray box will appear in the lower-left corner where it says first Sending… and shortly afterward Sending. Next to that, the Undo option appears.
By clicking on Undo, the email is withdrawn and becomes a draft again so you can correct what went wrong. However, the option is only available for a few seconds, so it is important that you regret it immediately after you have clicked send. Once the email has been delivered, it is, just like with regular mail, not possible to undo it.
Undo sent mail in Gmail’s Inbox app
If you use the Inbox by Gmail app for your email, you can undo a sent email there as well. It works in basically the same way only that a gray box appears at the bottom where the option for Undo is included immediately after you have sent an email.
Undo sent mail with the older version of Gmail
If you have not switched to Gmail’s new inbox variant but continue with the old one, you can activate the function to undo sent mail in Settings> General> Undo send
You can also choose how many seconds you want to cancel the transmission: 10-30 seconds.
How does this really work?
It’s easy, once you think about it. The only thing that Gmail does is that they do not send the email immediately, but they hold it for a few seconds, thus delaying the actual sending so that you have the opportunity to regret it.
A feature that might be needed for SMS, tweets, and Facebook comments as well sometimes. The fact that we write things a little too quickly often creates problems. When that delay is not in your own head or the trigger finger, it would sometimes be nice if it was built into the technology.