Undo Send : The new feature in Gmail.

A new feature now available in Gmail aims to rid your life of that classic "Oh Damn it" e-mail moment.

"Undo Send" puts a five to 10-second hold on all outgoing messages. If you had addressed an e-mail to the wrong person, let slip with an embarrassing typo or simply said something you really, really shouldn't have, Undo Send can be a lifesaver.  As with most enhancements to Google's free webmail app, Gmail users can enable the new Undo Send feature by going into their Labs settings and turning it on, click on the little green flask at the top of the screen, or go to Settings and click on the Labs tab. Gmail users can usually access new features shortly after they're announced, but the features take time to roll out across all accounts, so be patient if it doesn't show up right away.

Turn it on and every time you send an e-mail, you'll see an Undo link at the end of the confirmation message that appears at the top of your inbox.

Do nothing and the e-mail goes out. Click Undo and you get dumped back into Compose mode.  The default setting is five seconds, but the Gmail Labs folks tell us you can increase it up to 10 if you wish. In my testing, I only saw options for "5" and "0" seconds in the drop-down list. Perhaps the 10 seconds option would be rolled out in future.

Undo Send cannot pull back any e-mail that has already gone out. But a 5-second window should catch most embarrassments. I have been using Outlook to access my mail and it has an option to re-call any mail that is unread. This Gmail Labs addition is perhaps a first time for web-based mail services, or so I think.

Check out a post on the official Gmail blog by Google User Experience Designer Michael Leggett for more information.

An after thought : Why don’t we just use the five seconds or perhaps more to make sure that we want to send it before it actually goes out? Re-checking an email before sending it causes no harm – or does it?