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You Can Unsend that Email, Honest

by Keith Gatling | 4 years ago

Have you ever fired off an email message to someone and immediately regretted it? Or maybe you just put the wrong information in it. Or maybe you just sent it to the wrong person. Or maybe you really screwed up and sent an embarrassing email message to everyone in your group.

We've all been there at least once.

Well, the good news is that if you use Gmail, you have a chance to undo that...if you act fast enough.

Maybe you've already noticed that when you send a message in Gmail, you'll get a little banner at the bottom of your screen that says Sent/Undo. This is your chance to go, "Oops!" and prevent that message from really being sent out to whomever. But you have to act fast, because you only have five seconds.

Which isn't really a whole lot of time.

That's OK, because you can change that.

In the browser version (not any of the apps), go to Settings, then See all settings, and go to the General tab. Now look down four items, and you'll see a setting for Undo Send. Here you can choose 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Then scroll to the bottom of the screen and select Save Changes.

I have mine set for a whopping 30 seconds. That should protect me from the most common oopsies.

But suppose you want a little more time? Suppose you want to be able to let the message actually sit for a day or two before it goes out so you can think about it a little more (always a good idea when you're really steamed about something)?

In that case, you want to try Gmail's Scheduled Send, which I'll talk about in a different post.