aNewDomain.net — Too quick on the Send button? No worries — providing you act quickly. In Gmail, it’s possible to enable an experimental feature from Google Labs called Undo Send. Once enabled, that will let you unsend messages within half a minute after you send them. It’s easy to do, too. Here’s how to unsend messages in Gmail.
First, you need to enable the Undo Send feature in Gmail.
To do that, open Gmail and hit the Gear icon. Select Settings to bring up the settings window. At the top, you will see the Labs option, at top and third from the right.
All following screenshot image credits: Gina Smith
Select Labs to bring up the Gmail Labs page. Note, as Google does, that Gmail Labs is experimental — a “testing ground” for features not yet ready for primetime. Google Labs cautions that any feature available there — and there are a ton of them, as you’ll see — could “change, break or disappear at any time.”
Various Lab features are listed on this page in alphabetical order. Scroll down to Undo Send. The default setting is Disable. Click Enable. Save changes at the top of the page.
Now send a test message — or any message. The feature works. You’ll see, for about 30 seconds, the following message inviting you to Undo the sent message at the top of the screen. You’d better act fast.
That’s all there is to it. Cool trick. And a throwback to the days when undo send was a typical feature in old systems like CompuServe and MCI Mail.
For aNewDomain.net, I’m Gina Smith.
Gina Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s memoir, ” iWoz Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It” (W.W. Norton, 2005/2007/2012). With John C. Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle, she is the editorial director at aNewDomain.net. Email her at gina@aNewDomain.net, check out her Google + stream here or follow her @ginasmith888.
boy have i needed this!