London - Everyone has experienced that sinking feeling after sending an e-mail to the wrong person, clicking on “reply all”, or bashing out a message in the heat of the moment that you wish you could take back.
But now there is a tool hidden away among other Gmail settings that allows users to unsend e-mails.
However, there is only a 30-second window of opportunity for hasty senders to realise their e-mail mistake as after that time the message cannot be unsent.
The handy tool that could spare people blushes is buried in the “Gmail Labs” section of Google’s e-mail service and has to be enabled before the unsend action can be used.
To find the feature, people with Gmail accounts should go into their inbox as usual and look for the cog icon in the top right corner of their computer screen.
Clicking on the icon allows a user to select the “settings” option and then pick “Labs” from the horizontal toolbar that appears.
To find the unsend feature, users have to scroll almost all the way to the bottom of the products listed to enable the function, which is simply called “Undo Send”.
The description says: “Oops, hit ‘send’ too soon? Stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.”
Once the user has enabled the feature, they need to save it by pressing the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom of the page.
When the feature is enabled, every time a person sends an e-mail they will see a yellow dialogue box that says “your message has been sent”, which also gives the option to undo their message within 30 seconds of sending it.
The e-mail reopens in the same window it was written in and remains unsent.
The option to undo sent e-mails is automatically set to appear for 10 seconds after the “Send” button is pressed, but this can be extended to the maximum 30 seconds, Business Insider reported.
To do this, users can go to “Settings”, then “General”, before clicking on “Undo Save” to boost the time to 30 seconds.
Just like all products in Google Labs, the new version is an experiment and can change and disappear without any notice. – Daily Mail