March 19th, 2009
New Gmail feature gives users a chance to Undo Send
As Gmail gets ready to celebrate its fifth birthday (on April 1), Google rolls out yet another feature that goes to show that they really have learned a thing or two about e-mailing habits.
Today, the company is announcing Undo Send, an experimental feature in Google Labs that will give users a chance to change their minds about the e-mail they just sent.
Who among us hasn’t heard horror stories of e-mails that never should have been sent - maybe it had a major typo or an e-mail trail that wasn’t meant for all eyes? Better yet, what about those e-mails that should have been sent as a “reply,” not a “reply to all.”
Google said most mistakes in an email are spotted just as it’s being sent and that five seconds is actually just enough time to hit the Undo Send button and bring that message back as a draft. From the official Gmail blog post:
This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. For extra cushion, you can increase the time to 10 seconds. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.
It’s not the first feature that Google has added to Gmail to help senders from finding themselves in an embarrassing situation. The company also offers an e-mail attachment detector, which stops a message from going out if Gmail notices that the message references an attachment but none is there.
Something a bit more fun is Mail Goggles, a late-night feature that makes users do a simple math problem to send the message - just to make sure that you really want to send that 2 a.m. message to your ex, begging her to take you back.
Google notes that Undo Send is a Labs feature, one that’s still being refined and could be buggy. The company is asking test users to share feedback on how to make it better.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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