Undo Send in Gmail
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gmailblog.blogspot.com
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.
If you disagree, you need to post a comment, not click the downmod button. HN is not Digg.
I can suggest something as ridiculous by saying, well, if the other user hasn't logged into their account since receiving my message, I should be able to log into their account and delete my message.
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.
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.)
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.
I doubt it.
Stop doubting :)
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.
I think that feature would be abused.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
1. Compose email to A-list investor
2. Hit send
3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
4. Kill self
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
Lesson here is, if you use GMail, don't e-mail yourself to check if sending works at the moment.
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.
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 :)