It sounds like they've done some research to back up their 5 second logic.

I had my own method of "undo" that I've been using - I simply put GMail in offline mode when I am batch replying to emails. Then before I send, I do a quick glance at my outbox. If everything looks good, I go back into online mode

Before this I was just saving as drafts, but that seemed a little messy.

I do wish this was configurable though. It would be nice if I could set it to perhaps 10 minutes with some sort of override (e.g., I am on the phone or chatting with someone right now and I am trying to send them directions or something). Most of my emails are not that time sensitive anyway.

By the way, is there a feature in Gmail such that it would remind me about an e-mail if it is not replied to? For example if I ask a client "should the icon be in cornflower blue?" I'd like to be reminded if they haven't replied to it in X hours.

I don't think there is a way to do this automatically, but I've been using the super stars in GMail for this. I use one of them to mark emails that I'm waiting for a reply on, so I can follow up with people if I don't hear from them for a while.

This is something I'd very much like to see.

5 seconds? Does that really help? How about making it adjustable?

It is adjustable (from the main settings page after you enable it) but the only options for me are 0 and 5. Zero?

Anyway, they are probably going to introduce 10, according to this article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10200370-2.html

...but Coleman also told me there's an option to increase the un-send time window to 10 seconds. "We may decide to add longer options," he said.

If it's being sent to a gmail address, why not allow the user to undo it as long as the receiver has not looked at it yet?

I'd stop using Gmail, personally. To me, it feels like the receiver has a right to read an email he receives. It would feel... intrusive... for the app to decide to delete some of my data when I'm not looking (or rather when I haven't looked yet).

That said, the "panic button" undo feature seems like a great idea. But 5 seconds is way too short. (I'm envisioning my Dad using this feature in this case, not a techie.) 30 seconds seems perfect -- it's probably not a big deal that your message gets delayed by 30 seconds, and it gives you some 'think time' to remember a detail you forgot to add or fix.

If no one sees an email in their inbox, is it really there?

filters run

Privacy. It would become something like a read receipt.

The recipient could disable this, then.

By default, Gmail tells you when your contacts are online anyway... so if you want to see if someone is reading their email, you can just click their name and send them an IM. This doesn't invade their privacy any more than that does.

(BTW, the undo conditional should be "seen", not read. Basically, if the recipient has logged into Gmail since you've sent the message, undo should not work.)

I use my gmail accounts via IMAP. You can't see me when I'm logged in.

Then IMAP could count as "seeing" too.

Give up, this is a horrible idea.

Emails can be forwarded automatically, notification of new emails can be sent to mobile devices, they can be tagged/labeled/moved/starred, add-ons or third party apps can screen scrape and process that information... all without a message being tagged as "read" and some of these without even being logged in.

If you want to implement a think-it-over delay in your client, go right ahead. If you want to arrange something with your provider (Gmail) to be able to stop delivery (a la UPS) then go right ahead, but you're going to have to be mighty quick.

Once its in my inbox, however, it's mine. Any provider who would do such a thing would certainly loose me as a subscriber. Your best bet is a nicely worded apology letter.

Would you really go to the effort of telling all your contacts you have a new e-mail address if Google added this feature?

I doubt it.

I use google apps for my email, so I own my email address.

Stop doubting :)

Hmmm... Maybe they could add an automatic "send apology" button...

You could make it a limited resource. You could only do this say once a month per recipient.

That's a stupid idea. This isn't a turn based game. What the hell would once a month per recipient do for you? It wouldn't be a useful tool if it didn't provide value to the user at all times. What happens if I screw up much more than one time? Great, I was saved once, but that really didn't do much.

And as for the original idea, it's stupid too. When I browse my inbox, I know exactly what's there, opened and unopened. Once it's sent to me, it's mine. I don't want to see messages appearing/disappearing from my inbox if it's not me doing the manipulating.

I'm all for brainstorming and developing new ideas, but come on, give these ideas some thought.

Why is this modded down to -3? This isn't trolling or spam, this is a legitimate suggestion.

If you disagree, you need to post a comment, not click the downmod button. HN is not Digg.

Probably because it's such a weird/dumb suggestion it is hard to distinguish from a troll.

If it's past the 5 second point and it is to a gmail address, then it could try to undo without telling you if it was successful.

That would be of little use; you couldn't resend or assume that they had or hadn't seen it. It would be no better than not having any undo at all.

For one thing, because it would give you an incentive not to receive mail at gmail.

This makes me feel old, but AOL used to do this way back in the day.

The old managers at my company have talked wistfully of the pre-Lotus Notes email system that allowed you to yank emails out of someone's inbox - if they had not yet clicked to read them yet.

I think that feature would be abused.

Exactly what kind of abuse do you have in mind?

Currently, my mailbox is so full of junk that if someone wants to send me less mail, I'm extasic.

Really, crying wolf about privacy is one thing, but give me a realistic example.

The worse example would be the silent withdrawal of an offer for a contract (not that anyone would do that)

I usually notice the problem just after clicking on the send button so 5 seconds would be plenty of time for me. I conjecture most people are like that.

I agree that we all notice the problem immediately after clicking the send button.

The question is, would having an X second delay cause that moment of realization to shift to the point right after the delay has run out? I bet it would.

Then no amount of customization of the delay would make any difference.

Exactly; my instinct is that it would increase initial perceived value, but it wouldn't have a permanent impact.

It's more a concern that I'd have both hands on the keyboard and the mouse cursor somewhere unknown over several screens ... and not being able to hit undo fast enough, rather than not realising in 5 seconds.

Enable keyboard shortcuts. Hit `z'.

I would never need more than 5 seconds, because by then I will have switched to the next activity and cleared the email from my in-brain queue anyway.

Typical use cases are where you notice just while hitting Send that you: promised a link but didn't actually paste it in; sent mail to a bunch of people and instead of bcc-ing spammed everyone with the whole addressee list; were on auto-pilot and signed mail to your boss with "xx"...

...lots of things that can be caught in 5 seconds. Most of the time I actually just forgot to mention something - so I think undo-send is not so much a service to senders but rather to recipients, who would otherwise have to deal with a higher number of emails.

Well, it seems to be only a Labs feature... I guess it will be improved in the future.

One thing I don't like about many of the things in Google labs is the lack of settings like that. I also don't like that there is no way to set how much offline data Gears will store.

I have the same problem with Google Earth. What labels, points and such it shows seems to depend on the position and shape of the moon rather than on the position of the screen and the zoom level. Sometimes I want to see something (like a village's name) that I just know is there but I have to center the screen on something next to it and then try a couple of zoom levels to see if I can make it show up.

Also, Picasa with its smooth scrolling. I try to scroll somewhere by dragging the scrollbar or clicking it and instead of scrolling where I drag or click it, it scrolls smoothly (read: slowly) at a top speed of maybe three pages per second. Aargh!

Oh yeah, Google Earth has this too: when you click the N on the compass to realign your screen with the cardinal directions, they thought it would be neat to make it turn really really smoothly. And it seems the closer your screen is to perfect alignment, the slower it turns.

The frustrating part is that Google should know this and make it configurable. I have no idea why they refuse to do this all the time. (Though I haven't used their stuff in a while so I have no idea if it's been fixed by now.)

Lots of people have pointed out several possible improvements to this feature. Now if we could anticipate these things with a few minutes of contemplation (each), I'm sure Google would have come up with the same list of gripes.

But obviously, they did some tradeoff analysis and decided to do what they did.

Now, from a technical standpoint, the fact that they implemented this feature in the present way results in some information of their internal infrastructure and engineering organization to leak through.

The 5 second, non-configurable timeout should allow us to speculate a little bit on what Gmail's architecture is.

The only reason I can think of is that maybe the undo operation results in a scan over all queued email for all users. This is obviously an expensive operation, so maybe they cannot easily increase this delay with their current architecture. They'll have to add per-user queues on their servers. Maybe that's too big an engineering project at present.

What do you think?

Microsoft Outlook has had a sophisticated version of this for a long time. I know a guy who had set up Outlook to send all his email 30 min after he hit send. You can even schedule a message for sending at an arbitrary time (i.e., per-message level granularity of send delay).

For instance, the Microsoft Outlook implementation of this feature essentially implies that each client can queue up emails for later delivery on the server and later interrogate this queue in a sophisticated way (i.e., it's not fire and forget).

I suspect it's simply browser side and the send button holds off actually POSTing the email for five seconds.

Probably not. They say that if your browser crashes or you close the browser immediately after hitting send, the email still gets sent.

If this was MS they would also add a feature that sends an email when you cancel one, saying something like "bonaldi tried to recall message x".

Exchange does that for non-MAPI clients, which always sends you racing to read whatever it was you weren't supposed to see. Great thinking.

is it me or is their approach stupid as hell?

wouldn't it make more sense simply not to process sending the email for a specific user-specified time?

i.e. automatically you don't send email for 10 seconds, but a user can go to preferences and setup the undo feature for 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min etc.

I mean 5 seconds is pretty much useless...its more or less the "oh shit, I forgot an attachment", but there is really no difference for user between 5 seconds or 5 minutes, and I'm fairly sure most people, given the choice, would select the 5 minute delay.

If memory serves, I think Paul Bucheit mentioned this a long time ago and I wonder what took them so long? But, anyways, a good one I need this one.

I don't really see the logic in this. It seems like the typical workflow they're imagining goes something like:

  1. Compose email to A-list investor
  2. Hit send
  3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
  4. Kill self

So now they're trying to make this the workflow:

  1. Compose email to A-list investor
  2. Hit send
  3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
  4. Hit undo and fix problem

All well and good, but step #3 requires you to look over your email and realize you made a mistake. Why not just do that before you hit send?

Why should keyboards have a backspace key? Just make sure you always press the correct key, then you won't need it. Easy!

There's a gmail labs plugin that looks at your email and if it sees you mention attachments but not attach anything, it will ask you before you send.

I think 10 seconds would be the sweet spot. I mean, the moment of panic usually comes about 3 seconds after you hit send. leaving 2 seconds for the actual click.

Especially in light of the fact that to be effective, you have to forget the delay is there. Then there's the moment of panic, then there's the moment of remembering that there IS an undo feature, and then the moments to click back to the GMail tab and click.

It does not seem to work. I sent an email to myself, immediately hit undo. It told me that the action was undone, but there was a new email sitting waiting for me.

I think there is a shortcut when you email yourself (even if you email to an account that gmail is POP accessing rather than the gmail itself, it will appear immediately) - perhaps this circumvents the undo.

Yep, in fact this is especially noticeable in situations when your GMail is not working for whatever reason. Once, I had my GMail account temporarily disabled for a day (I set up some filter that immediately deleted and forwarded certain e-mails which apparently got triggered too many times and caused a temp shutdown) but was still able to send e-mails to myself.

Lesson here is, if you use GMail, don't e-mail yourself to check if sending works at the moment.

Just tested it and it works.

Microsoft Exchange introduced this feature years ago.

I once did mistake of sending mail to wrong person in my university and within seconds of clicking "send" I'd realized what I'd done as well as the consequences of it. I rushed to the sys admin who calmly said "No problem, we'll take it out from queue. On average a message, outside our domain, takes fiteen MINUTES to get dispatched!". And he removed mine from the queue. This was back in 2002.

Exch Admins can play with these settings. Adjusting when the queue runs is one option, but you could be unlucky and hit send when there's a small queue that's running in 10 seconds. I think admins can also force a delay, which is a different operation than spooling it for the normal SMTP process.

Outlook/Exchange users can also delay sending (though reneging may take an admin to do): http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1638/how_to_delay_sending_mes... . Gmail needs this feature badly!

Handy if you'd like to compose a announcement early or appear to be working hard at 6 when you really left early to hit the links :)

I wonder if the Mail Goggles idea was a spinoff of the the undo idea: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sendi.... Generally seems like the same dilemma. Does the recipient have a right to your drunken email?

Strange... without the undo feature you will need to send another e-mail to that person or another time the same e-mail to the right person. In this way google will display more ads and earn more money... maybe it will be a 'pay for undo', or a 'this undo was sponsorized by ___'

Cool! I guess this is as close as it's going get to my pet feature request: a preview feature for emails. (I absolutely suck at scanning text for errors in a textbox.)