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.

Comments

That makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds inherently stupid. How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.

Re:That makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds inherently stupid. How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.

You have fallen victim to marketing hype.

What this "feature" does is place your sendmail into a pending outbound que, which has limited size. Thus, its primary effect is to restrict your ability to spam/flood email out of the gmail servers.

The 'undo send' option is just for show.

Re:That makes no sense

[discord5]

That reminds me of a company I used to work for. A woman there, usually very kind and agreeable, was fed up with one of her contacts feeding her a lot of excuses why he wasn't able to make a deadline for the 3rd time. She thought she forwarded a nice e-mail to her manager containing some very choice words expressing her opinion that matter.

Oh how quickly that send button was smashed without carefully verifying who was in the To field, only to discover that instead of forward she had pressed reply to all. When the deed was done and the mailserver had delivered her incredibly inflammatory experiment in vocabulary she stood at my desk nearly in tears asking me if I could stop her mail from reaching its destination.

Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.

Surprisingly though, that person never missed a deadline again.

Re:That makes no sense

[Tiger4]

We use Outlook/Exchange. It had a message recall button, but the function wasn't enabled. Which meant about once a week you could see a message with a followup THAT ASKED THE READER if the previous message could be recalled. Even if you said yes (after reading the mistaken message of course) the bad message did not disappear.

This worked great a flag for screwed up mail to be read first. Thanks Microsoft!

Re:That makes no sense

[nine-times]

Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.

The option to retract messages as implemented in Outlook isn't a bad idea, really, but I still hate it for the false impression it creates. I've seen it happen enough that some user becomes familiar with the feature and then comes under the impression that it actually allows them to rescind email messages at will, regardless of the circumstances. I've even had a couple users get angry with me-- as though I had the email server configured incorrectly-- because, after having sent the message over the Internet to some random person, the "Recall this message" feature didn't actually prevent the recipient from reading it.

My Idea

[potpie]

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

Mail Goggles

[modestgeek]

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