9 ms·
Undo Send in Gmail
- tlrobinson 18y ago5 seconds? Does that really help? How about making it adjustable?
- KevinBongart 18y agoWell, it seems to be only a Labs feature... I guess it will be improved in the future.
- amichail 18y agoIf it's being sent to a gmail address, why not allow the user to undo it as long as the receiver has not looked at it yet?
- briansmith 18y agoPrivacy. It would become something like a read receipt.
- amichail 18y agoIf it's past the 5 second point and it is to a gmail address, then it could try to undo without telling you if it was successful.
- mcav 18y agoThat would be of little use; you couldn't resend or assume that they had or hadn't seen it. It would be no better than not having any undo at all.
- amichail 18y agoYou could make it a limited resource. You could only do this say once a month per recipient.
- jrockway 18y agoWhy is this modded down to -3? This isn't trolling or spam, this is a legitimate suggestion. If you disagree, you need to post a comment, not click the downmod button. HN is not Digg.
- menloparkbum 18y agoProbably because it's such a weird/dumb suggestion it is hard to distinguish from a troll.
- kyro 18y agoThis isn't a legitimate suggestion. It makes email a gimmick. I can suggest something as ridiculous by saying, well, if the other user hasn't logged into their account since receiving my message, I should be able to log into their account and delete my message.
- kyro 18y agoThat's a stupid idea. This isn't a turn based game. What the hell would once a month per recipient do for you? It wouldn't be a useful tool if it didn't provide value to the user at all times. What happens if I screw up much more than one time? Great, I was saved once, but that really didn't do much. And as for the original idea, it's stupid too. When I browse my inbox, I know exactly what's there, opened and unopened. Once it's sent to me, it's mine. I don't want to see messages appearing/disappearing from my inbox if it's not me doing the manipulating. I'm all for brainstorming and developing new ideas, but come on, give these ideas some thought.
- jrockway 18y agoThe recipient could disable this, then. By default, Gmail tells you when your contacts are online anyway... so if you want to see if someone is reading their email, you can just click their name and send them an IM. This doesn't invade their privacy any more than that does. (BTW, the undo conditional should be "seen", not read. Basically, if the recipient has logged into Gmail since you've sent the message, undo should not work.)
- mahmud 18y agoI use my gmail accounts via IMAP. You can't see me when I'm logged in.
- cousin_it 18y agoThen IMAP could count as "seeing" too.
- furyg3 18y agoGive up, this is a horrible idea. Emails can be forwarded automatically, notification of new emails can be sent to mobile devices, they can be tagged/labeled/moved/starred, add-ons or third party apps can screen scrape and process that information... all without a message being tagged as "read" and some of these without even being logged in. If you want to implement a think-it-over delay in your client, go right ahead. If you want to arrange something with your provider (Gmail) to be able to stop delivery (a la UPS) then go right ahead, but you're going to have to be mighty quick. Once its in my inbox, however, it's mine. Any provider who would do such a thing would certainly loose me as a subscriber. Your best bet is a nicely worded apology letter.
- palish 18y agoI'd stop using Gmail, personally. To me, it feels like the receiver has a right to read an email he receives. It would feel... intrusive... for the app to decide to delete some of my data when I'm not looking (or rather when I haven't looked yet). That said, the "panic button" undo feature seems like a great idea. But 5 seconds is way too short. (I'm envisioning my Dad using this feature in this case, not a techie.) 30 seconds seems perfect -- it's probably not a big deal that your message gets delayed by 30 seconds, and it gives you some 'think time' to remember a detail you forgot to add or fix.
- dontforget 18y agoMyspace Mail (which for a long time was bigger than gmail), has always allowed it. Never heard any complaints about this very useful feature. It's not unprecedented.
- craigbellot 18y agoIf no one sees an email in their inbox, is it really there?
- sleet 18y agofilters run
- wallflower 18y agoThe old managers at my company have talked wistfully of the pre-Lotus Notes email system that allowed you to yank emails out of someone's inbox - if they had not yet clicked to read them yet. I think that feature would be abused.
- alain94040 18y agoExactly what kind of abuse do you have in mind? Currently, my mailbox is so full of junk that if someone wants to send me less mail, I'm extasic. Really, crying wolf about privacy is one thing, but give me a realistic example.
- wallflower 18y agoThe worse example would be the silent withdrawal of an offer for a contract (not that anyone would do that)
- teej 18y agoThis makes me feel old, but AOL used to do this way back in the day.
- tptacek 18y agoFor one thing, because it would give you an incentive not to receive mail at gmail.
- Hexstream 18y agoI usually notice the problem just after clicking on the send button so 5 seconds would be plenty of time for me. I conjecture most people are like that.
- jodrellblank 18y agoIt's more a concern that I'd have both hands on the keyboard and the mouse cursor somewhere unknown over several screens ... and not being able to hit undo fast enough, rather than not realising in 5 seconds.
- andreyf 18y agoEnable keyboard shortcuts. Hit `z'.
- colins_pride 18y agoI agree that we all notice the problem immediately after clicking the send button. The question is, would having an X second delay cause that moment of realization to shift to the point right after the delay has run out? I bet it would.
- Hexstream 18y agoThen no amount of customization of the delay would make any difference.
- colins_pride 18y agoExactly; my instinct is that it would increase initial perceived value, but it wouldn't have a permanent impact.
- jncraton 18y agoOne thing I don't like about many of the things in Google labs is the lack of settings like that. I also don't like that there is no way to set how much offline data Gears will store.
- koningrobot 18y agoI have the same problem with Google Earth. What labels, points and such it shows seems to depend on the position and shape of the moon rather than on the position of the screen and the zoom level. Sometimes I want to see something (like a village's name) that I just know is there but I have to center the screen on something next to it and then try a couple of zoom levels to see if I can make it show up. Also, Picasa with its smooth scrolling. I try to scroll somewhere by dragging the scrollbar or clicking it and instead of scrolling where I drag or click it, it scrolls smoothly (read: slowly) at a top speed of maybe three pages per second. Aargh! Oh yeah, Google Earth has this too: when you click the N on the compass to realign your screen with the cardinal directions, they thought it would be neat to make it turn really really smoothly. And it seems the closer your screen is to perfect alignment, the slower it turns. The frustrating part is that Google should know this and make it configurable. I have no idea why they refuse to do this all the time. (Though I haven't used their stuff in a while so I have no idea if it's been fixed by now.)
- yungchin 18y agoI would never need more than 5 seconds, because by then I will have switched to the next activity and cleared the email from my in-brain queue anyway. Typical use cases are where you notice just while hitting Send that you: promised a link but didn't actually paste it in; sent mail to a bunch of people and instead of bcc-ing spammed everyone with the whole addressee list; were on auto-pilot and signed mail to your boss with "xx"... ...lots of things that can be caught in 5 seconds. Most of the time I actually just forgot to mention something - so I think undo-send is not so much a service to senders but rather to recipients, who would otherwise have to deal with a higher number of emails.
- anuraggoel 18y agoIt is adjustable (from the main settings page after you enable it) but the only options for me are 0 and 5. Zero? Anyway, they are probably going to introduce 10, according to this article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10200370-2.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10200370-2.html ...but Coleman also told me there's an option to increase the un-send time window to 10 seconds. "We may decide to add longer options," he said.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- eli 18y agofinally!
- markessien 18y agoIt does not seem to work. I sent an email to myself, immediately hit undo. It told me that the action was undone, but there was a new email sitting waiting for me.
- jwilliams 18y agoI think there is a shortcut when you email yourself (even if you email to an account that gmail is POP accessing rather than the gmail itself, it will appear immediately) - perhaps this circumvents the undo.
- albertni 18y agoYep, in fact this is especially noticeable in situations when your GMail is not working for whatever reason. Once, I had my GMail account temporarily disabled for a day (I set up some filter that immediately deleted and forwarded certain e-mails which apparently got triggered too many times and caused a temp shutdown) but was still able to send e-mails to myself. Lesson here is, if you use GMail, don't e-mail yourself to check if sending works at the moment.
- rms 18y agoJust tested it and it works.
- sidsavara 18y agoIt sounds like they've done some research to back up their 5 second logic. I had my own method of "undo" that I've been using - I simply put GMail in offline mode when I am batch replying to emails. Then before I send, I do a quick glance at my outbox. If everything looks good, I go back into online mode Before this I was just saving as drafts, but that seemed a little messy. I do wish this was configurable though. It would be nice if I could set it to perhaps 10 minutes with some sort of override (e.g., I am on the phone or chatting with someone right now and I am trying to send them directions or something). Most of my emails are not that time sensitive anyway.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- simplegeek 18y agoIf memory serves, I think Paul Bucheit mentioned this a long time ago and I wonder what took them so long? But, anyways, a good one I need this one.
- vegashacker 18y agohttp://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/quick-all-actions-should-have-undo.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/quick-all-actions-s...
- bonaldi 18y agoIf this was MS they would also add a feature that sends an email when you cancel one, saying something like "bonaldi tried to recall message x". Exchange does that for non-MAPI clients, which always sends you racing to read whatever it was you weren't supposed to see. Great thinking.
- bemmu 18y agoBy the way, is there a feature in Gmail such that it would remind me about an e-mail if it is not replied to? For example if I ask a client "should the icon be in cornflower blue?" I'd like to be reminded if they haven't replied to it in X hours.
- cstejerean 18y agoI don't think there is a way to do this automatically, but I've been using the super stars in GMail for this. I use one of them to mark emails that I'm waiting for a reply on, so I can follow up with people if I don't hear from them for a while.
- chops 18y agoThis is something I'd very much like to see.
- hypermatt 18y agoI will use this quite often lol, I would like to configure it tho.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoI think 10 seconds would be the sweet spot. I mean, the moment of panic usually comes about 3 seconds after you hit send. leaving 2 seconds for the actual click.
- mildweed 18y agoEspecially in light of the fact that to be effective, you have to forget the delay is there. Then there's the moment of panic, then there's the moment of remembering that there IS an undo feature, and then the moments to click back to the GMail tab and click.
- mutoxen 18y agoStrange... without the undo feature you will need to send another e-mail to that person or another time the same e-mail to the right person. In this way google will display more ads and earn more money... maybe it will be a 'pay for undo', or a 'this undo was sponsorized by ___'
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoI don't really see the logic in this. It seems like the typical workflow they're imagining goes something like: 1. Compose email to A-list investor 2. Hit send 3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck 4. Kill self So now they're trying to make this the workflow: 1. Compose email to A-list investor 2. Hit send 3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck 4. Hit undo and fix problem All well and good, but step #3 requires you to look over your email and realize you made a mistake. Why not just do that before you hit send?
- vaksel 18y agois it me or is their approach stupid as hell? wouldn't it make more sense simply not to process sending the email for a specific user-specified time? i.e. automatically you don't send email for 10 seconds, but a user can go to preferences and setup the undo feature for 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min etc. I mean 5 seconds is pretty much useless...its more or less the "oh shit, I forgot an attachment", but there is really no difference for user between 5 seconds or 5 minutes, and I'm fairly sure most people, given the choice, would select the 5 minute delay.
- psranga 18y agoLots of people have pointed out several possible improvements to this feature. Now if we could anticipate these things with a few minutes of contemplation (each), I'm sure Google would have come up with the same list of gripes. But obviously, they did some tradeoff analysis and decided to do what they did. Now, from a technical standpoint, the fact that they implemented this feature in the present way results in some information of their internal infrastructure and engineering organization to leak through. The 5 second, non-configurable timeout should allow us to speculate a little bit on what Gmail's architecture is. The only reason I can think of is that maybe the undo operation results in a scan over all queued email for all users. This is obviously an expensive operation, so maybe they cannot easily increase this delay with their current architecture. They'll have to add per-user queues on their servers. Maybe that's too big an engineering project at present. What do you think? Microsoft Outlook has had a sophisticated version of this for a long time. I know a guy who had set up Outlook to send all his email 30 min after he hit send. You can even schedule a message for sending at an arbitrary time (i.e., per-message level granularity of send delay). For instance, the Microsoft Outlook implementation of this feature essentially implies that each client can queue up emails for later delivery on the server and later interrogate this queue in a sophisticated way (i.e., it's not fire and forget).
- shadytrees 18y agoCool! I guess this is as close as it's going get to my pet feature request: a preview feature for emails. (I absolutely suck at scanning text for errors in a textbox.)
- sharjeel 18y agoMicrosoft Exchange introduced this feature years ago. I once did mistake of sending mail to wrong person in my university and within seconds of clicking "send" I'd realized what I'd done as well as the consequences of it. I rushed to the sys admin who calmly said "No problem, we'll take it out from queue. On average a message, outside our domain, takes fiteen MINUTES to get dispatched!". And he removed mine from the queue. This was back in 2002.
- furyg3 18y agoExch Admins can play with these settings. Adjusting when the queue runs is one option, but you could be unlucky and hit send when there's a small queue that's running in 10 seconds. I think admins can also force a delay, which is a different operation than spooling it for the normal SMTP process. Outlook/Exchange users can also delay sending (though reneging may take an admin to do): http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1638/how_to_delay_sending_message_outlook/ http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1638/how_to_delay_sending_mes... . Gmail needs this feature badly! Handy if you'd like to compose a announcement early or appear to be working hard at 6 when you really left early to hit the links :)
- roblocop 18y agoI wonder if the Mail Goggles idea was a spinoff of the the undo idea: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sendi.... Generally seems like the same dilemma. Does the recipient have a right to your drunken email?