Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewmate | Hacker News Reader

In reality, I think the only way to do this is just not to let the email leave the bounds of their own servers for x seconds, and then only if the user hasn't canceled in the meantime. Maybe it's possible to do if you host the email for both sender and receiver, but even then, it seems unlikely given the implications of being able to see an email literally disappear from your inbox.

View on HN

Exchange offers this functionality - retract an email sent to internal senders. It sometimes fails with "The sender would like to retract this message" shown above the email.

I have only seen this fail. Literally never seen it succeed but we are on O365 so maybe it used to work?

Hilarious though to see people try.

I once worked with a guy who had an Outlook rule that immediately marked new mail as read ( and flagged 'to action' or something like that ) specifically to defeat Exchange recall.

Admittedly he did manage to harvest some interesting information but mainly it was just managers trying to correct typos.

It was effective before blackberries (and the iphones that killed them). Basically it worked when there was a chance that you'd hit recall before anyone's mail client would have actually pulled it down.

I saw people (try to) use it a decade ago. Same result.

Well, if it succeeded, you wouldn't see it.

Along those lines, the Outlook developers forgot to implement message recalls on the Mac client.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com