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Understandably GS is not a very sympathetic figure, but in general I don't think it's unreasonable to wish for an email "undo" if you fat-finger the recipient address and realize it immediately.

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Microsoft Exchange has that feature, exposed in Outlook. The fun thing is that IIRC it sends a special email to trigger it. So if the recipient is not using an Exchange server, he sees both emails.

A reply to the email with a single line saying "recall", IIRC. I got one of these from a business partner years ago... it was intended as an internal email between them, not as a response to us. It was kind of hilarious. I was very tempted to reply "no" :)

If you want people to read your email, recall it:

"fred@example.com would like to recall the email 'Foo bar'"

[OK] [Cancel]

That already exists. Visit the "GMail Labs" section of your settings.

If you don't realize you did it in a few seconds you're still shit out of luck, though. I imagine most people won't realize they sent it to the wrong person until they're notified of the other party not receiving it, or there's an unusual length of reply time. I wonder how people would feel about emails being undoable until the other party opens it.

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