Mistake in your email? Enable “undo send”

Although I have been an advocate for reducing email, we can’t really live totally without it. (Although that might be a great topic to explore.)

But what happens when you send an email and notice right after you sent it (to your English teacher!) you had several misspelled words? Or, you accidentally selected “reply to all,” but only wanted to reply to one person? Or, you sent an email to the wrong person? Or any number of mistakes that are easy to make with email.

Since the beginning of email, you simply had to live with your embarrassing (or not) mistakes. That is, until now. Those bright people at Google have ingeniously come up with a feature in their Google labs suite of ideas called “undo send.”

Yes, you read this correctly. If you realize you actually did NOT want to send that email, you can have 5 seconds to rescind it. Yeah, I know, don’t you wish you had MORE than 5 seconds to respond? But heah, it’s better than NOT having this feature.

Here’s how you can enable it in your Gmail:

Go to your settings tab in Gmail and click the Labs tab. In here you will see extraordinarily creative things. Scroll down to “Undo Send,” enable it, and click Save changes at the bottom. Then, whenever you send an email, a button that says “Undo” will pop up on your screen for five seconds. If you hit the button within that time, the service will retrieve the e-mail in draft form — allowing you to make changes or cancel the message altogether.

“Sometimes … I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake,” said Michael Leggett, a Gmail Labs designer and the creator of the “Undo Send” feature, in the Gmail blog. “I forget to attach a file, or e-mail the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.”

So, if you are like me and wish that sometimes you could grab and fix that sent email, this feature is for you.