Most people have accidentally sent an email that wasn’t quite finished or wasn’t addressed to the right person. Or maybe even an angry email that was rashly sent — you know, one of those emails where you write up your anger in a therapeutic way, never intending to share, but you mistakenly hit “Send” instead of “Trash.” It happens.
Regardless of the situation, you say that you want to take back that email you just sent? Well, Gmail gives you a 10-second window to do exactly that.
You just have to enable the feature:
- Click the Gear Icon in the top right corner of your Gmail window and select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Across the top of your Settings window are links to different sections of the Settings area.
- Click Labs in that list. (Labs is where they put the experimental features.)
- Scroll down the Available Labs list to the Undo Send feature.
- Click Enable.
- Scroll to the bottom of the window and click Save Changes.
Once Undo Send is enabled, the yellow dialogue box in the Gmail window that displays “Your message has been sent” will also give you the option to Undo (for 10 seconds only).
Now you have, and know how to use, the ability to take back your emails, which is good because, after all, they say hindsight is 20/20.
David Redic has worked as a programmer, data analyst, website builder, IT director, tech writer, copy editor and educational filmmaker. He’s currently the webmaster at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices – Kovack Realtors, and he also blogs about wine.