Google has added an Unsend feature to its Gmail service. But it’s only designed to catch momentary blunders and leaves no room for carefully-considered regrets.

The new feature is, as with most additions to the service, entirely optional. Users can access it by clicking on Settings, then Labs, then selecting the Undo Send option. You’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the screen as its currently five entries up from the bottom of the list.

There have, of course, been options to unsend an e-mail before with other systems, but they have usually been limited to messages sent to people using the same system. For example, on AOL it was possible in some circumstances to recall a message you’d sent to a fellow AOL member as long as the recipient hadn’t opened it yet. But once you sent a message to somebody on another system, that was that.

The new Google feature works through a remarkably simple trick: despite the name it doesn’t actually allow you to unsend a sent message. Instead it adds a five second pause after you click Send before carrying out the action. During this time you can click on a link marked Undo to cancel the dispatch. This then takes you back to the composing screen with the full text of your message available to edit.

If you enable the feature but then close the Gmail page or lose your connection during the five seconds, your message will still be sent. It’s also worth nothing that the tool doesn’t work for messages you send to your own address, so you can’t test your finger-speed that way.

Clearly the service is of no use for situations where you reconsider your decision to send a message once your mood or sobriety level changes (try Google Goggles for the latter). But it might help overcome the irritating inevitability that clicking Send will immediately bring to mind an extra point you forgot to mention in the e-mail.

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Entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 2:48 pm under Google, Tips and advice.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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