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Can you “Unsend” Email in Google Gmail?

 January 28, 2017 /  Dave Taylor /  Gmail Tips & Help /  No Comments

I have a bad habit of sending an email, then reconsidering what I’ve said. Is there any way to “unsend” an email message from Gmail so I can rephrase it?

So Google has a time machine you can tap into called Gtime. That’ll take care of what you’re asking about: it lets you back up a maximum of 15 minutes into the past.

No, just kidding. There’s nothing like that available — as far as I know, at least! Ya never know with Google — but there’s a different way to solve the problem and it’s a feature that started out in Gmail Labs and is now a full-blown part of the standard Gmail system: Undo Send.

What it does is delay actually sending your email after you click on the “Send” button, letting you have a few seconds to come to your senses and “Unsend” the message, which then lets you continue composing it, change your mind and delete it, etc.

For real. Let’s have a look!

Here I am writing an email to President Trump, and I’m poised to send it:

sample gmail message to president@whitehouse.gov Pin it! Share on Facebook

Without any changes, a click on “Send” sends the email, done deal, nothing I can do about it.

But instead, let’s enable Undo Send and see how things change. To do that, you’ll want to choose “Settings” from the gear menu on the top right:

gmail menu - settings

Once you choose that, you’ll see that there are a zillion different preferences and settings for your Google Mail / Gmail account. It’s quite staggering, actually. But don’t worry, you can stay on the main page, “General” settings. Just scroll down to find this:

enable undo send, gmail

Enable it by clicking on the checkbox. That’s easy enough.

By default, it has a 10 second delay, but you can tweak that to be longer if you really need a few seconds to think:

how long undo send delay gmail

Five seconds seems almost pointlessly slow, but it might be good if you find that you accidentally press Send without having actually finished your email. I know I certainly get one of those sort of emails every day or two, followed a few minutes later by “sorry, sent that too soon”. On the other extreme, 30 seconds is a pretty long time in practice.

Set as you desire? Great. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the Settings page and click “Save” to make sure that the change affects your Gmail experience.

Now I’m going to click “Send” on that letter to the President. This time the little yellow alert window has a new link:

message sent, undo? gmail

Actually, now that I think about it, I do want to work on exactly what the letter says before really sending it along to the White House. That’s done by clicking on the “Undo” link in the middle of the status window — before it vanishes and it’s too late!

The message composition window re-opens with my message loaded, and the status update changes to:

unsend recall unsent email message gmail

A very simple concept, but certainly quite easy to work with, and as long as you don’t realize hours later that you shouldn’t have sent a particular email, it will prove most helpful for you!

Now about that time machine, Google…

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Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!
 gmail labs, gmail preferences, gmail settings, gmail undo send, google mail, google time machine, recall email, undo email send

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