Unsending an e-mail

kelle

I was wondering, if you've sent an e-mail to a wrong person, is ther any way of unsending it before the recipient reads it? No, it hasn't happened to me, but for a split second I thought I'd sent an e-mail to a wrong address - such a relief when I found out I hadn't!

blahblah06

you can defo do it with outlook ? depends on which service you use

Boggles

You can recall an e-mail through outlook providing you send it through an exchange server, if you sent it to a pop account you can't.

Capt'n Midnight

You can delete it from the outbox in the unlikely event it's still there.

With exchange you can open sent items and go into the email and tools actions recall. And then you get a choice on recall or replace. By then of course unless your email has large attachments or the exchange server is overloaded it's already been sent to the outside world.

Once an email has left the smtp server you are connected to there is nothing you can do. Most emails that people want to recall are small messages which get sent VERY fast.

So from a practical point of view you can treat email as being unsendable.

kelle

Thank you all. Next time I want to let rip about an irritating relative, I'll be extra cautious before sending it (her son's e-mail address is immediately after my brother's on my list of addresses, and I thought for a very agonizing half minute that I'd sent it to him!)

tklemonade

kelle wrote:

Thank you all. Next time I want to let rip about an irritating relative, I'll be extra cautious before sending it (her son's e-mail address is immediately after my brother's on my list of addresses, and I thought for a very agonizing half minute that I'd sent it to him!)

All this modern technology will be the death of us

That or chicken flu!

seamus

I'm very careful in work not to say bad things about anyone. A couple of times I've put the wrong person's name in the to: field because I was thinking about them. The message would just be "Can you ring x" or "X would like Y", even though I'd want to say much more

Even with exchange, the recall can fail if the person has already opened the mail, or refuses the recall.

Capt'n Midnight

seamus wrote:

Even with exchange, the recall can fail if the person has already opened the mail, or refuses the recall.

IIRC even if it works the recipient still gets a message about the email being recalled - so you might get asked about it, especially if you had an interesting subject.

kelle

tklemonade wrote:

All this modern technology will be the death of us

That or chicken flu!

Crikey, TK, you can say that again. It just takes a split second to press that "nter" button, or "Send" on your mobile phone, and it could ruin your life!

Karoma

It just encourages a stiff upper lip: "if you don't have something good to say about someone..."

"..Encrypt it and send it to others who the little shoite too."


I sent an email to the head of H.R. by mistake before..fortunately my emails are cryptic by default and the point was lost. phew!

mneylon

We've had a few corporate clients try to recall messages sent to us in the past. Kind of amusing as we don't use Exchange

Besprechen

bear in mind that if they do use exchange and you do try to recall it, they get sent both messages, if they dont click on the recall one first they can still read the original message (or preview it and then let you think they havent seen it). I think i make some sense?!??

Capt'n Midnight

Actually the procedure is exactly the same as for snail mail.

You have to remove the mail from the outgoing postbox before it gets collected by the delivery system.

Or you just have to figure out how to get to the recieptants mailbox before they do.

Cabaal

God forbid, but if you use AOL to send mail you can un-send it (only if its another AOL user)

Capt'n Midnight

The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator