Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Adds 5 Second Send Rule
theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the
five-second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.
Best thing ever, Or you could type up that nasty email in notepad, and keep it forever to review when you feel like giving the ultimate F*ck you to you boss or whoever.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
This sounds inherently stupid. How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
I understand the rationale on this but the hold time needs to be much longer...like 12 hours for it to be effective.
Or it should be combined with the beer goggles add-on.
Either way, this won't stop my ex-girlfriend from drunk-calling me...
We don't live in Shouldland.
My idea for preventing the submission of blank e-mails or e-mails lacking that attachment you were going to remember:
put the recipient address field below the message field
would that be helpful for anyone besides me? y/n
Esoteric reference.
"one of a few folks to note"
You mean, along with everyone who read it on The Register last friday.
Some people can barely react in that time. Although I can appreciate that a pop-up should not last longer, would a settable delay of 1-10 minutes really kill the medium? Perhaps with a "Send now" option on pending emails for urgent communication.
They've also had a Mail Goggles feature for a while. It makes you do some simple math problem to determine if you're sober enough to send the email. This might be useful for those who drunk mail now instead of drunk dial. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html
Thats a good idea, but is 5 seconds really long enough to go "DOH!"?
Think Deeply.
a/s/l?
I want you to tweak my nipples with a grapefruit spoon.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
{Galaxy Quest}
(Paraphrased)
"What's the Omega 13?"
"Opinions vary. Some think it's a doomsday device. But I think it rolls back time."
"What do you mean?"
"13 seconds is enough time to fix one costly mistake"
{/Galaxy Guest}
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Oops, wrong channel.
Dammit. When is slashdot going to implement the five second rule?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I use Thunderbird, which has an "are you sure you want to send?" confirmation by default. Since I use the ctrl-return hot key to send, I usually just blast through this message so at one stage, I switched it off.
However, I found that in the half second between pressing ctrl-return and return to confirm, my brain was actually doing some checking to make sure I should send that message.
I sent a reply to a whole message board asking for more information about a job - not a disaster, but not what I had intended. I realised almost as soon as I had hit the button, but I'd switched off the confirmation by this point. I rapidly switched it back on. Since then, I've noticed quite a few occasions on which I've hit ctrl-return and then realised I should tweak my message in some way before I send it.
In conclusion: 5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it could make all the difference.
Generally, if you are stupid enough to send a flaming email to your boss without a serious desire to quit that predates your immediate rage, 5 seconds won't be enough. For every boss that is so bad they'd make a saint froth at the mouth like someone with Tourrette's, there are 20 cases where the employee who does that is just being an immature douchebag. For those people, 5 seconds won't be anywhere near enough time to come to the realization that they just shot their employment in the back of the head, and personally, I say good riddance in this economy. My wife works for a real fiend, and even she is still glad that she has her job.
How long does it take an Adrenaline to come down on your system. Enough to stop the fight or flight instinct. That mean time should be the proper period plus some response time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think this is a great feature. It has happened to me lots of time. Forget to add an attachment or forget to add an other statement or something and you remember about that as soon as you sent it This way it helps quite a lot of folks like me. But 5 seconds is a shot time I hope they up it to 10 seconds to give slow responders like me to turn around and stop the damn send.
I know more than once I've fired off an email (or made a post in say...a forum somewhere, ahem...) and twitched a second later saying NO thats NOT what I meant to do!
For example, 30 seconds ago I accidentally modded a comment here Offtopic when I intended to mod it Insightful. So here I am doing the next best thing to Undo... posting to undo my errant moderation. Guess slashdot could use some Undo too eh? Too bad there's no similar trick for email.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
On AOL, you could un-send mail after any amount of time as long as:
the recipient was also an eol user.
they hadn't yet opened the email.
Saved my butt more than a few times.
Didn't AOL have a feature like this a while back? Not that I ever used AOL *cough*
A popup. How lame, lazy, and dangerous: (I realize it's an optional setting)
- First, it's NOT undo... this is a delay tactic. A real undo would have the system hold the mail in your "outbox" for a user customizable time, from where you can snatch it, but only when you need to.
- Second, you now have to wait, EVERY time you send an email. Because "email regret" happens only now and then, it's likely to get turned off. Back to square one.
- Third, if there ever was a "Send now" button, you'll get so customized to pressing it, that you're again back to square one.
I appreciate the effort, but this gets an F. Please, head back to the labs, make something really sensible (i.e. not lame), and try again.
why not promote that Outlook-"Please dear mailserver, delete my last email"-Follow-Up (don't know how it's called there) to a real RFC?
bickerdyke
A spanish blog I read blogged about this... three years ago. And it is freakish that he posted a screenshot of how this should look like, and Google have implemented this in that exact way.
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This is in no way a new idea, it is just that they refinished it and expanded the capability.
While AOL may be reviled as the internet-on-training-wheels, they did have some interesting ideas. In this case, the "unsend" mail feature that allowed the user to pull-back email that hadn't been read yet. Granted, it only worked within their system and it helped that they owned the mailboxes and servers, but the concept is far from new.
Google has done nothing more that take the concept and add a delay. Nothing innovative here, move along.
The other day I felt so generous that I sent an email telling someone that I would pay 2,000, 000, million billion US dollars to anyone who would help me get my dead father's money out of Nigeria.
A second later I thought "you know I could just keep the money myself", but it was too late. Keep looking, you might be the lucky one getting my email.
Another solution is to always sit back and read through the entire message (and recipient list) before hitting send.
I mean that quite literally. Remove hands from keyboard, sit back and just read.
That habit has saved me a lot of trouble in the past.
Really guys? You're linking to the CNN article instead of the official gmail blog's article? What, Al Jazeera didn't have an article up for this, too?
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html
most of the times the ctrl-enter confirmation box of thunderbird saves me some typo or whatsoever minor mistake.
It's good to see Slashdot reporting on technological achievements of this magnitude. I can't wait to hear the next GUI tweak for some other application. Perhaps the repositioning of a button, or a change in the font size of some GUI element will be next.
Truly advancements of this sort can only be achieved by a think tank of the best minds Google could recruit from top universities.
Better known as 318230.
I personally added a "Delay Sending by One Minute" rule into Outlook at work. It saves me a lot of embarassment when I hit send without adding my attachments (happens a lot). I wouldn't mind a similar gmail holding pen.
so 5 seconds after you send an email you start regenerating mana.
I hate signatures
I hate you all and I think you all will never appreciate VI in half as deep a level as I do. Yeah? Go to Windows hell for all I care. Yeah?
/., could we have a 5 seconds rule here as well? Yeah? Also, could all my foes and freaks get a 5000 second rule? Pleeeeeaaaase? Yeah?
No, wait, I didn't really mean that. Yeah? I wanted to say how much I love you guys. Yeah? And how much I think you connect with me on a VI level. Yeah?
Dear
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
You have to enable this feature in GMail Labs before it works.
To those who are claiming that 5 seconds is not enough to regret hitting Send, that's not the purpose of the function. It's aimed at the times in which you are in the middle of writing the message and accidentally hit the Send (maybe while trying to hit Save).
I am a big Google Labs user. I think they have a few really excellent little toys. Then there are others that are rubbish, but I like to focus on the good things in life :)
Anyhow, the 5 second delay is just perfect for me. I am an emotional person, I admit. I have often sent an e-mail and regretted it the next second. 5 seconds sounds about right for me to change my mind.
Another labs I use is the "notify of missing attachment". That's pure gold - basically, if I mention attachments in my e-mail, but don't provide it/them, I am notified when I try to send the e-mail.
Now, if they only added the option "reply or resend with full text (NO quoted text hiding)", that would be wonderful.
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It would be better if it showed you the mail you can just written and asked you to confirm.
Like Slashdot comments. Perhaps a delay so people can't automatically click on confirm.
That's not a terrible idea. There have been a number of times that I've sent an email with the body of text saying "here's the report you asked for" and forgot to attach it. which made me feel like an idiot.
You can avoid that from happening ever again. And it's very simple:
Before you write any sentence mentioning an attachment, attach the file first.
Same goes for important mail. When writing a job application, finish the email first, then add the recipient address last.
I lost my sig.
refer to the Apple section, you can find it on the left.
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This is for those times when you accidentally hit the send button before you've finish
Whenever I replies to/writes a sensitive or important email, I clear the To/Cc fields, completely, and only add the addresses just before I'm sending. ... This, of course, should be after I've proofread it several times, and preferable waited a day :-)
Works in all email clients!
I always thought it was just because Outlook was slow, someone should have told me it was a feature.
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You must not have a small child. I get a lot of /sending before the sentence is done/ problems due to my daughter hitting the send button for me.
Having small children requires a lot of quick responses to unexpected events. Yesterday, while I innocently sat coding, my daughter gave me a gooey handful of cat poop she found somewhere. After a quick exercise in emergency bathing my wife and I cleaned/searched the house and were unable to figure out where she managed to find this special gift at. The joys of parenthood.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mind explaining this rule a bit? I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would be sweet to have it documented for the world.
Honestly, I always thought of "previews" and stuff as a cop-out way to avoid the trouble of implementing a 30-minute edit feature.
In theory, I could preview the post I'm about to make, but in truth, I'll just blast right through it.
Besides, previews and "reading the entire email before sending" doesn't catch the same kinds of errors as reading it after a minute or so. After you forget about writing it, your brain can spot mistakes easier.
But yeah, for the super-ultra-important email? Read it once through. Anything else? Honestly they are going to skim the email just as quickly...nobody reads more than a few sentences of most emails anyway.
Rule number one of electronic communication: never send any while angry. Always calm down first.
Google, develop something for my iPhone that makes me solve a series of differential equations before I'm allowed to send out a text message after 11PM.
Please.
Or maybe just.. "Hold your iPhone level for 60 seconds if you would like to send this message."
That'd solve 95% of my relationship problems.
I suspect this feature has less to do with preventing embarrassing messages and more to do with making it more "expensive" to send spam.
has a metered, five second latency before realization..if years of maintaining mailservers have taught me anything its that users will routinely do the strangest and most irresponsible things in an email and expect you to magic it better. is this actual innovation?? have they run out of things better to do?
Good people go to bed earlier.
You seem to be writing an inflammatory email. Should I help make sure it doesn't go to your boss?
Or
You seem to be writing a drunken email to your ex-girlfriend. Are you sure you want to do this?
Google, develop something for my iPhone that makes me solve a series of differential equations before I'm allowed to send out a text message after 11PM.
Please.
Or maybe just.. "Hold your iPhone level for 60 seconds if you would like to send this message."
That'd solve 95% of my relationship problems.
You get so drunk you can't find a table, or even the floor?
Not a bad idea,I like the idea of unsend too. Why not make the delay a user setting, that way you can configure your own time frame?
I remember several years ago a call in the middle of the night. A manager had stayed late to write a crushing, inflammatory performance review and had accidentally sent it to the whole company.
I mean that literally -- he sent it to every single person with an email account from the CEO to the janitors -- several thousand people. Bad naming choice for a key mail alias.
This was back in the days when email was a lot more primitive, so we really did have a chance in hell of scrubbing all the mail servers before start of business day, but it took us most of the night. And I did get one or two night-owls say the next day "I thought I saw a really interesting email, but then it suddenly vanished".
This particular manager got off easy -- I don't think we could have accomplished the scrub in this day and age. What I learned from this is to look my emails over once more before sending, including address fields and subject line. It takes only a few seconds and improves the quality of communication. Side note -- If only people would read what they just wrote before hitting "send"... If I'm writing something controversial, I finish the text and let it sit while I get a cup of coffee or perform some unrelated task. There's always time to press "send" later if I still feel that way.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Now, if they add a "send 5 seconds *before* I hit Send" rule, that will be a real innovation!
In the old days before before spanhaus, you could send mail with your own personal sendmail server. It delayed it 15 minutes so if U changed your mind you could kill sendmail & delete the queue. Of course Goog stock is worth a lot more than sendmail stock so yeah, the official first 5 second rule would be now.
Groupwise has had this feature for so long, I can't remember when they didn't have it.
If the person hasn't read the email, you can pull it back out of their inbox.
This feature has saved more people then you can possibly imagine.
it is cool to start a thought in the subject field, and finish it in the body field.
Good grief how I hate that. It can completely change the meaning of a post.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Eudora and Thunderbird have had this for some time. Probably Outlook too, not like I touch that thing.
what happened to all the stuff we learned in school about proof reading?
Why would you turn it off if you're the one that turned it on in the first place specifically to use it? This is, after all, an opt-in experimental feature that you have to deliberately enable.
"Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor..."
Whoever did come up with that rule wasn't a parent.
There ... that's better.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I have pancreatic cancer, you insensitive clod!
By 11PM?
This happened loooooooooooooooooong (one or two weeks) back. /. is seeing it now?
Five seconds, clearly, is not enough