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Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

> Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-discipline and patience

I eagerly await your new email client which provides both self discipline and patience to users. Until it releases, I suspect the Undo Send option will continue to be used.

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But email has been this way for a very long time. And aren't many other common user-to-user messaging systems this way? iOS messages and old-fashioned texting/SMS, for instance. And postal mail and phone calls and answering machines and face-to-face interactions, for that matter.

I think of it as more important when email is being used as an announcement medium - I'm ok leaving a mistake/sending a correction to one or two people, but not 1100.

Presumably you also put more time and focus into emails that are being sent to 1,100 recipients versus emails to 1 recipient, and you send more of the latter than you do the former. But the "undo send" gives you 10 minutes of extra-edit time to that important announcement as well as every other email you send.

If "undo send" gives a psych boost to being obsessive-compulsive, this still doesn't address the additional layer of possible failure. You have better control over your ability to not hit "Send" then you do to do a panic cancel as you do a last second proofread.

I accidentally ctrl+enter fairly often when formatting emails.

You're trying to cram everyone's problem into the same box, it's silly.

There's plenty of reasons you might undo an email if you had the chance.

Taking a 10-minute break is not something I've ever done before I sent an email.

I've done that too. For emails and for things that have an undo/delete option since their inception (Twitter, Facebook, Slack). With email I've accepted to be more careful about when sending very important emails. And for less important emails, be OK with sending an addendum, even when it's on a mailing list.

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