Can I stop or unsend an email I sent by mistake?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
let's get right to the question.
"I wrote an email from my Yahoo email
account and sent it to the wrong email address in Europe.
Is there any way I can retrieve the email I sent to the wrong email address
and delete it before the wrong recipient can read my email?"
No.
Flat out the answer is no.
There are a couple of exceptions, one of which isn't an exception at all.
But the answer you need to keep in mind and always remember is simply no.
Once an email has been sent, it cannot be unsent.
You've lost all control over it.
I'll describe why that is and what those exceptions are all about.
When you hit send.
If you're using a PC based email program, your message is then immediately
transmitted to your email service provider.
Perhaps your ISP, perhaps your other email service provider.
The emails sent from your email provider to the email provider of your recipient.
The email is placed in that recipient's
inbox and if the recipient is using a PC based email program, then eventually,
sometime later, that email has been downloaded onto their PC.
There are a couple of things that are
really important to remember about this scenario.
One is the first steps up to and including
the arrival in your recipients inbox can all happen in seconds.
Literally, you can hit send, and within seconds that message can appear
in the inbox of your recipient, regardless of where on the planet they might be,
regardless of the steps that the message delivery takes.
Once it leaves your machine,
once it leaves your account, it is out of your control.
There is nothing you can do about that message anymore.
Now, every time I talk about this,
I immediately get responses from people saying, but what about Gmail?
They've got Undo send.
It's a poorly named feature.
Gmails undo send does not undo send.
At best, it delays sending up to 30 seconds.
In fact, that's the option.
If you take a look at the option for undo
send to enable it, all it really does is it gives you the option to change your
mind up to 30 seconds of your hitting the send button.
Once the 30 seconds is up, you're out of luck.
It's exactly the same as if it had been sent immediately.
So Gmail's undo send is not an undo send.
It is simply a delay to give you an opportunity to change your mind.
Now, there are some real honest and goodness exceptions.
One of them is what I will call corporate systems by that.
I mean, if you're working in a large company, a large ish company and they have
their own email system and it's of a certain type that supports this.
It is sometimes possible to literally undo a send.
You take the message that you sent, you say, recall it or undo it or whatever.
And that email system
reaches out to the inbox of whoever was getting that message and Yanks it back.
Now, there are a couple of really, really important caveats about this feature.
One is everybody's got to be on the same
email system, and I'm not talking about everybody on Gmail or anybody in Yahoo.
No, I mean, everybody is working for the same company,
and they're all using the same email system within that company.
This does not work as the moment you transfer from one email system to another.
Like you're sending email to that company
or you're in that company sending email outside of the company.
The features lost.
The feature will not work because
that ability to reach into somebody's inbox doesn't exist across the Internet.
Kind of sort of.
There are scenarios where
if you're in the right place at the right time, using the right software,
maybe even even then, you can't recall it after somebody's seen it.
In other words, if they've seen it,
there's no way for you to make them unsee it.
Now there is a recall feature in most email programs.
When email was originally designed,
there actually was a protocol that allowed you your email service provider or your
email program to send a request to the recipient, saying, you know what?
I'd like to recall that email message.
I'd like to not have you look at it, but it's a request one.
All those requests, just like return receipts and delivery notifications.
Almost everybody ignore those these days
for Privacy reasons, they would tell spammers you're legit.
For example, more often than not,
these requests to recall a message actually end up drawing more attention
to the message that had you done nothing because it does show up.
That recall request shows up
in the recipient's inbox, at which point they'll say, I
wonder why they want to recall this message.
I think I'll go look at it.
So the moral to this story is very simple.
There is no undo send.
There is no way to unsend an email.
Once you hit send it's out of your
control, the only thing the only thing you can do is make sure you mean it.
Hopefully that helps for updates.
For related links for comments and more, visit askleo.com/2149.
Leo Noltenboom. This is askleo.com.