Re:Ask HN: Should email providers add "UNSEND"?
by hansmoleman on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @02:34PM
(#422330)
At one time or another, we've all accidentally sent an e-mail, probably by invoking the keyboard shortcut.
I would definitely be waiting to have my emails delayed a few seconds if Gmail would momentarily display an Undo option. This would mean that the email wouldn't even be sent until after the Undo option expired, so we wouldn't need to worry about the email protocol.
Re:Ask HN: Should email providers add "UNSEND"?
by hernan7 on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @03:23PM
(#422426)
Yes, having "unsend" as part of the mail client functionality is the way to go.
Maybe the "send the message right now this exact millisecond" function should require an extra step from the user. And the default action should be to enqueue the outgoing messages and wait for N seconds/minutes before sending them.
And add some rule-based "are you sure you want to send this?" function since you are at it.
If, say, gmail implemented this, it would likely require an ACL from the receiving user that specified senders that were allowed to recall.