Nothing about mobile really, but I thought I’d tap into your collective wisdom and see if anyone answer this.
Occasionally, you get an email, followed by another shortly afterwards as someone has an oh-my-god-did-I-really-press-send moment. The follow-up one says that:
Yada Yada would like to recall the message, “All you need to know about avoiding mistakes in emails”.
All this seems to achieve is to make me look harder at the original to see what’s so embarrassing about it that the sender doesn’t want me to see it. It doesn’t magically remove it from my email Inbox or something genuinely useful. So really, what’s the point in this tool? Can anyone shed light?
If you hit the recall msg first before opening the original email, then it deletes the original email. It assumes everyone is using the same email app and hence only really works within large organisations who all share the same platform.
Folk are a tad silly if they try to use it to recall external emails.
I think it is a MS Exchange feature and not all are set up to send email out immediately. Sometimes you can recall an email while it’s still on the Exchange Server before it gets sent externally.
I had a journalist co-worker once who received an internal e-mail, apparently because his name was similar to someone in the company. The PR rep who sent the e-mail called and after much haggling managed to get him to commit not to write about anything in the e-mail — which he agreed to do because there was nothing of interest in there. We all had a good laugh. A couple of hours later, towards the dog end of the day, he just starts laughing again and doesn’t stop…sure enough, the PR rep had done it again…
Not really relevant, but you brought it to mind…
Thanks for the input, people.
Russell
Are you thinking, wouldn’t it be great to have an sms recall function?
Then again, I could do with a life rewind function from time to time…
David - yes, I was thinking something along those lines, among other things.
Russell
Maybe email should have a built in buffer, like live radio which has a 10 second buffer. So if you hit send and then suddenly realize your mistake, you have a period in which the operation can be reversed.
On occasions I wanted a the following feature that I have never come across in email. I want to be able to send an email at a future time, where the email will be not be received before such a time.
It’s a MS Exchange feature and works well if the receiver uses Exchange and hasn’t opened your message yet. For technical reason, your pen friend was not aware you were not using it—and there is no checks on the receiver mail server prior to offering that option.
I used to use it a lot when I was a consultant with a pain-in-the-back boss (”Send It! — Take it back!”) and I always checked on the mail header (the scrambled secret attachment to all e-mails) whether my clients used Exchange.
The funny thing today was, I sent an SMS to the wrong person, and received an SMS which was not sent to me.
” seems to work just fine!
Somehow, “Sorry!! Not for you
I guess the only need for such a tool, is to (seemingly) professionally retract a message, and try to save face by ensuring that you didn’t retract it personally!
Quite at the other end of the scale is the non-optional 30 seconds buffer you get when you send mass email newsletters.
In my case, I weekly sent to +400,000 recipients. I’d check, check again, and check once more, then hit the “send” button. I then had to watch a painful 30 second countdown before seeing the emails get sent. It was like pulling off a band-aid slowly, a horribly stressful moment that gave me cold sweats even after a year of weekly sends.
Blergh, I far prefer blogging to email marketing. Correct your copy with a small dose of {del} and people will generally be lenient.