San Francisco — On one occasion or another, everybody sends an email, but noticing some mistake as they hit the “send” button and wanted to call it back. And search engine giant Google Inc. last week added a new feature to its Gmail service called Undo Send, a Gmail Labs experiment that offers users the ability to recall e-mail message they have sent by mistake for five seconds. Clicking on “Undo Send” will return a message to its draft form. The feature can grab messages before they are delivered and is being rolled out to users worldwide.
Adding this new feature to Gmail is intended to save you from embarrassment, while giving users a chance to retrieve messages in cases where they have addressed the email to the wrong person, sent the wrong subject heading or made an error in the email content.
Undo Send enables you to terminate the delivery of any Gmail message within moments of sending it.
“This feature can not recall an email that has already been sent; it just holds your message in queue for five seconds, so you have the chance to hit the panic button,” said Michael Leggett, Gmail user experience designer, in the Gmail blog.
“And do not worry: if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we will still send your message.”
Gmail Labs also includes a “Forgotten Attachment Detector,” which also blocks messages that mention an attachment but do not actually include one from being sent.
To activate the feature, users need to turn on the Undo Send option in Gmail under Settings/Labs tab option. Once the feature is activated, a new “Undo” link will appear next to every sent e-mail confirmation. When clicked, ‘Undo’ we will take you back to the composing window and confirm the retrieval of the e-mail.
Google has even added up some analysis to justify the addition: A company spokesperson pointed to a study showing that 87% of executives reported they have mistakenly sent or received an e-mail or other electronic message.
Last year, Google introduced a feature to Gmail intended to prevent users from sending drunken emails. “Mail Goggles” require users to solve five simple math problems in less than a minute in order to send a Gmail missive.