If you’ve ever drunkenly emailed your devotion to a former partner or accidentally used reply-all on an email thread to thousands of colleagues, good news: Gmail’s “undo send” feature has come to the masses.
The feature, which can prevent massive social embarrassment and help avoid long chats with the HR department about what you just mistakenly sent to a colleague, is to be a standard part of Google’s webmail.
It can be turned on from within Gmail’s settings menu and enables people to set a “cancellation period” of five, 10, 20 or 30 seconds after sending any email, during which they can call it back.
The feature has been available in Gmail’s experimental Labs settings for some time, and was recently added to the company’s Inbox mobile email app – so many of Gmail’s more tech-savvy users will have set it up already.
With 900 million active Gmail users, however, many will not have been digging through the Labs experiments, so making Undo Send a formal setting will bring it to the attention of many more people.
“Today we’re adding ‘Undo Send’ as a formal setting in Gmail on the web,” explained Google in a blog post as the change went live.
“‘Undo Send’ allows people using Gmail to cancel a sent mail if they have second thoughts immediately after sending. The feature is turned off by default for those not currently using the Labs version, and can be enabled from the General tab in Gmail settings.”
In May, Google executive Sundar Pichai said that 75% of Gmail users access their accounts from mobile devices. For now, if they want the ability to unsend emails, they’ll need to install the company’s Inbox app rather than using its main Gmail app or mobile website.
Gmail describes its Labs experiments as “crazy experimental stuff … a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime”.
Among those yet to graduate to format status are an option to show an authentication icon next to genuine emails from companies like eBay that spammers often try to fake, and a “canned responses” feature to set up common replies as buttons next to Gmail’s composition form.
