June 24, 2015

How To 'Unsend' A Sent Email From Your Gmail Account

Do you ever wish that there was an undo button for email? Gmail has offered this experimental feature for some time now. Google has finally officially acknowledged that most people send e-mails they really shouldn’t have sent. Gmail has officially added its “Undo Send” feature to the Web-based version of the service. Previously an experimental feature as part of Gmail’s “labs,” the feature lets users retract an e-mail after it’s been sent (think of all the embarrassment you’ll save yourself). It works by holding back the email for a pre-defined time, and then letting it go if users don’t say that they’ve sent it in error. Here in this tutorial you will learn how to ‘Unsend’ a sent Email from your Gmail Account using Undo Send feature in detailed.

How to Enable Gmail’s Undo Feature?

The Undo Send feature is now an official part of Gmail, no longer relegated to mere beta status in Gmail Labs. In honor of its new status, let’s see how the the feature works:

  • First, log in to your Gmail account on your computer.
  • Go to the little cog icon in the upper right hand corner and select “Settings.”
  • About a third of the way down the page you’ll see the “Undo Send” section.
  • Click the check box to Enable Undo Send.
  • Click the drop-box to set the Send cancellation period, meaning the number of seconds you have to prevent the email from being sent. You can choose 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds.
  • Make sure you hit “Save Changes” at the bottom and you’re all set.

Gmail’s Undo Send feature works differently in that it actually waits to send your email, giving you a certain amount of time to change your mind and prevent it from being sent. But you have to be quick, as Gmail gives you only a specific number of seconds to halt your email.

How to Undo sent emails in Gmail?

  • Click the Compose button at the upper left corner of your Gmail account page.
  • Compose a message and then click the Send button.
  • At the top of the screen, you’ll see a message that says: “Your message has been sent. Undo. View Message.”
  • To prevent the message from being sent, click the Undo link.
  • Gmail stops the message from going out and displays it in case you wish to make any changes and then resend it. If not, you can simply close the message, and it’s relegated to your Drafts folder where you can keep it or delete it.

The Undo Send feature is a handy way to ensure that the wrong email doesn’t get sent to the wrong person. People currently using the Labs version of ‘Undo Send’ will have the setting turned on by default at launch.

Hope this tutorial will definitely help you to ‘Unsend’ a sent Email from your Gmail Account within certain amount of time using Gmail’s Undo Feature. If you have any doubts comment below.

About the author 

Imran Uddin


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