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While it's not impossible, email just does not work that way. Email has no sense of state on the other end of a message. The extent of the feedback it gets is
by qhoxie 18y ago
While it's not impossible, email just does not work that way. Email has no sense of state on the other end of a message. The extent of the feedback it gets is a bounce that may or may not have a descriptive error attached to it. Some systems could implement a recall option (Exchange may allow this, but I'm far from an expert) if the accounts are housed in the same system, but it is rarely done as it is against the stateless aspect. Email as a protocol(s) is very simplistic, which is why spam and spoofing are so prevalent. There is little room to have complex extensions on top of the existing system.
If, say, gmail implemented this, it would likely require an ACL from the receiving user that specified senders that were allowed to recall.
- hansmoleman 18y agoAt one time or another, we've all accidentally sent an e-mail, probably by invoking the keyboard shortcut. I would definitely be waiting to have my emails delayed a few seconds if Gmail would momentarily display an Undo option. This would mean that the email wouldn't even be sent until after the Undo option expired, so we wouldn't need to worry about the email protocol.
- hernan7 18y agoYes, having "unsend" as part of the mail client functionality is the way to go. Maybe the "send the message right now this exact millisecond" function should require an extra step from the user. And the default action should be to enqueue the outgoing messages and wait for N seconds/minutes before sending them. And add some rule-based "are you sure you want to send this?" function since you are at it.
- qhoxie 18y agoWe are talking about a completely different thing now. Adding a delay or an Are you sure? confirmation is trivial but hardly solves the issue of regretting sending something intentionally.