You’re Saved! Email Now Offers Unsend
We can now avoid embarrassing mistakes with email unsend.
One of the central tenets of email is that hitting “send” makes it final. There are no do-overs, “undo” buttons, retractions or corrections. This can be viewed as a good thing. Emails that could appear then disappear might make inbox management even more of a struggle. but it can also lead to nightmarish scenarios any frequent internet communicator is probably familiar with.
Indeed, the desperate Google search “how to unsend an email” has long been the dead end for a person who sent a regrettable email to their boss or a snarky note to the wrong recipient. But with a new feature from Gmail, it seems there now is a way to undo our overzealous sending. But is that a good thing?
Better Move Quickly
It started earlier in the year when Google Labs—which is an opt-in service for Gmail users who are willing to experiment with new features—were given the opportunity to enable an Undo feature. With a maximum grace period of 30 seconds, it can’t exactly make up for emails sent the night before after a few glasses of wine, but it can account for un-spotted typos or wrong recipients that are realized right after sending.
More recently, the Gmail iPhone app—in its first major overhaul in four years—offered the feature to its users, albeit with a maximum “regret” interval of five seconds. This requires a very prompt reaction time, but it’s certainly useful in cases where you might have sent an email prematurely before you’ve finished composing it.
A Step Forward for Google
Reviewers seem to be fans of the new feature, as well as the Gmail app’s overhaul in general, with one reviewer writing in Mashable, “In recent years, I went from Apple’s Mail app to Gmail and finally settled on Microsoft’s robust Outlook for my email needs. I’ve been testing the new Gmail app for the last few days and I have to say, Gmail’s back in the running for best email app on iOS.”
While the “un-send” feature is a boon for the new app and in general expands its functionality, it does beg the question: what does this say for the future of email? While people don’t necessarily love working with overstuffed inboxes and sending the obligatory-but-tedious “did you get my email” note, email has become a necessary evil in terms of record keeping and business management. Many people who have tried to “quit email” or move to other workflow collaboration platforms have found themselves unable to rid their work lives of it completely.
A Step in the Right Direction
And while it can be irritating, email serves as an unalterable record of truth and fact when searching for past correspondence or holding our employees or colleagues accountable for what’s done and left un-done. If the ability to “unsend” email progresses further, it might relax our fears about making an error or sending regrettable notes, but we would lose the utility of always being able to dig through our inbox for time-stamped proof that something happened—or didn’t as the case may be.
In fact, this particular facet of email—the relative permanence of it—is one of the only places in online communication where we can’t go back and fix our mistakes. If we send a Tweet we regret, we can delete it. If we post a blog post or Facebook status that offends, we can simply edit it. This ability perhaps makes us slightly more cavalier in those forms of communications, whereas email commands a certain kind of diligence. If un-sending emails became a possibility with longer time intervals—even, say, after a recipient had already read a given message—we might find we year for the days when emails were a one chance only endeavor.