I write for a living, and yet recently, I almost sent an email to a colleague that mentioned the “League of Women Biters” instead of the “League of Women Voters.” You can probably relate ― who among us hasn’t had that stomach-churning, nail-biting moment when you realize autocorrect has twisted your correspondence into something risqué or worse?
It’s happened to me far too many times to count. But I’ve largely managed to escape embarrassment thanks to a Gmail setting that has been saving me from cringeworthy moments like this for more than a decade: “undo send.”
The feature dates back to March 2009, according to Harry Maugans, a cybersecurity expert with Privacy Bee, but almost nobody knew about it for years. “Google parked it in a testing area called Gmail Labs, which you had to dig into in the settings and turn on yourself,” he explained. “The feature actually didn’t become a built-in part of Gmail until 2015. So for about six years, it was sitting right there and most people had no idea.”
Many still don’t, even though Gmail is overwhelmingly the most popular email service in the United States, according to market reports. Three-quarters of Americans have Gmail accounts, compared with just 31% who use Yahoo mail, the next most popular service. I stumbled across this Gmail hack by accident, when someone mentioned it in a long-ago comment thread.
Essentially, this feature puts a temporary hold on your email, so when you hit send, you have a slight delay during which you can change your mind. A small pop-up in the lower left corner of the screen gives you the option to click “undo” and retrieve the email before it is sent out. Unlike some email retrieval features, the message doesn’t get sent initially so the intended recipients will never even know you made a goof.
You might have seen the option plenty of times already, but many people don’t know that you can change the amount of time in the delay. “It defaults to five seconds, but you can bump it up to as many as 30,” Maugans explained.
“Gmail’s ‘undo send’ feature is one of those tiny settings that can save people from massively simple mistakes,” said Rich Pleeth, CEO and co-founder of Finmile and a former Google employee. “I keep it set to 10 seconds because it gives you just enough time to catch the classic errors: wrong recipient, forgotten attachment, wrong BCC, typo or sending something before you have properly thought it through.”
For most people, 10 seconds is a good default, he said: “It adds a small pause without slowing you down, and in a world where work moves incredibly fast, that tiny buffer can prevent a lot of embarrassment.”
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Johan Konst, owner of an international public relations agency, said he uses Google’s “undo send” feature all the time. “Those few seconds are enough to stop the email and make a quick change before it actually leaves my inbox,” he said. “It is genuinely useful.”
He also gets a lot of mileage out of the “schedule send” option because he frequently sends emails to multiple time zones. This feature allows you to schedule what time an email is sent, so someone in Europe will get it at 8 a.m. their time, not ours.
To set up the “undo send” feature on your email, go to the gear icon, then click to see all settings. Click the General tab, find “undo send,” pick your delay time, and save. After that, every time you send an email you’ll see an “undo” option pop up at the bottom of the screen. If you click it before the 10 seconds (or whatever time delay you chose) elapses, you can reopen the email and make changes. But, “once that window closes, there’s no getting it back,” Maugans warned.
While you’re poking around in your Gmail settings, there’s another useful feature: “confidential mode.”
That setting lets you send an email that can’t be forwarded, copied, downloaded or printed. You can also set the email to self-delete after a certain amount of time, kind of like a Snapchat. “That one’s underused and genuinely useful if you’re sending something sensitive,” Maugans said.
My only question: Can we please somehow invent a way to have these settings for IRL conversations?
