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YOU CLICKED SEND. Oh crap.
When you send a no-take-backs email — maybe an admission to a secret crush, or accidental reply-all — there’s an instant pang of regret.
It feels like there’s no going back.
Meet Gmail’s Undo Send feature, a lifesaving little hack buried in the Gmail Labs settings.
It gives you a 10-second window to “undo” sending an outgoing email.
You just have to enable it first.
Here’s how it works:
1. Click the gear icon in the top right corner of your Gmail window and select Settings from the dropdown menu
2. Select Labs from the row of tabs
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you see Undo Send and click Enable
4. Hit Save Changes at the bottom
5. Breathe easy
Now when you send an email, the yellow dialogue that displays “Your message has been sent” will also give you the option to Undo.
Our tests consistently showed that you have about 10 seconds before the Undo option disappears. Click it, and the email will reopen, un-sent, in the composition window.
We weren’t the first to discover this cool trick. Jimmy Tomczak, founder of beach accessories company TOMBOLO, recently tweeted at me a link to an article by former Mashable editor and current Sprout Social editorial director, Samuel Axon. Gmail’s interface has changed since Mashable’s tutorial was published in 2010, so we updated the steps.
Note, features in Gmail Labs are experimental and may change, break, or disappear at any time. You’ve been warned.
- Melia Robinson
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Pity you can’t do that after pressing “send” on a phone text !!!!
Jason my phone has a cancel option if it’s pressed fairly lively you can cancel the text before it finishes sending.
One thing AOL got right years ago was the “unsend” function. As long as the recipient hadn’t opened the mail it could be unsent.
Pity such a fantastic feature is not part of everyday email services
This is what I love about the Journal these little stories because I never knew this either.
What a shite article.The journal is gone to sh1t lately .Total non news story yet again….Get yer fcuking house in order….
So sorry never meant to send that .Tried yo retrieve the post but couldn’t….Again so sorry …..
You dont have to read it.
Like the famous Monty Python sketch; the art of comedy is….timing.
I’d get a watch for Christmas if I were you.
This is there for years…
And i never knew..
And either did I !
Oh god …… Too late so very very late ……….. Thanks anyway journal ………..
I have this feature on my gmail app for Android. A dialog box pops up: “are you sure you want to send this message?” It’s a godsend!
Ive just tested this and gmail said the “sending had been undone” however the email was sent and received at the other end, so it doesnt work .
The Google algorithms thought the contents were too juicy or embarrassing to go unread.
A former colleague of mine and still a good friend, failed to hit reply to all on an email saying “F*** off” to someone (well me actually, I’d suggested that rather than mess about with email all day, as this particular chain had been going on for about 3 days, he install some software I’d been asking for for about a month), instead he punched in surnames and selected names from the company’s global address list. Unfortunately instead of one of our colleagues he sent it to a financial controller in France, and she was on holiday.
Fearing ruin he panicked and deleted the mail permanently from his sent items. As was pointed out to him at this point he was stuffed. So some enterprising sod mocked up his P45 for him.
So it is handy to know how to do this sort of thing.
She saw the funny side though, so no harm.
I can’t remember whether the software was ever installed.
I didn’t install it and we’re not friends.
Just leave it!
That feature is there a long time now, not a recent development by any means.
Not exactly an article I expected to see in the Business section of theJournal!
I didnt know you could do this, a very helpful article thanks for posting,..wish i had known about this before
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