A popular feature in Gmail has made its way to Outlook. Find out how to cancel a recently sent email with this simple guide.
Last year saw the launch of a magnificent features in Gmail which could have saved the jobs of many disgruntled folks when typing out aggressive emails – undo send email. Gmail rolled out this feature for the public allowing them to retract a sent email within seconds of sending it. This is a great way to deal with clicker’s remorse.
While the same feature isn’t directly incorporated into the website version of Hotmail, Outlook, etc. you can enjoy the ability to undo send an email in Outlook. So, if your clicker’s remorse is really in a deep state of hibernation, you have more than a few seconds to call back that controversial email.
This is a rather simple guide and has only been tested on Outlook 2016 since it is the only version available to us. As such it may or may not be present in previous versions of the application, so you are free to check.
It also goes without saying, but for this to work you need to have an email address already signed into Outlook, otherwise you will not be able to access the settings in Step 1.
Setting Up Outlook Rules To Undo Send Email
Here’s what we’re getting a hacked-together undo send feature in Outlook: we’re creating a rule for every outgoing email so that it is sent after X number of minutes (where X is up to you). Within that time frame, you will have the option to retrieve an email from outbox and edit it again before sending it for real this. Let’s get started now:
STEP 1: Open Outlook 2016 from your Start Menu or Windows Key + S. When the application is open, navigate to File.
Next, you will see the option of Rules and Alerts under the Info tab.
STEP 2: A new window will open up and here you will click on the tab “New Rule“, this will make a new window open up. Over here you have to look for the “Start from a blank rule” tree and look for the “Apply rule on messages I send” branch.
When you get a new box open up, click on Next and ignore the warning box that appears. We want the next menu that appears after this.
STEP 3: You will have a new window open up here, and this is where at the very bottom you will see a check box of “defer delivery by a number of minutes“. If you will notice, at the very top of this dialog box is “Step 1: Select action(s)”
Directly below that box is another box labeled “Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value)”
When you have selected “defer delivery by a number of minutes“, you will now see a hyperlink of “defer delivery by a number of minutes” If you click on the underlined line, you will get a new box open up, which will allow you to set the number of minutes before your email will send. Within that time frame, you will be able to undo that about-to-be-sent email so you can edit it before actually sending it, or perhaps delete it altogether.
The lowest value you can enter for this is 1 minute since 0 minutes will make the mail delivery instant and as such make the purpose of this guide moot.
You will not click on “OK” followed by “Next” and you will be done!
While the feature is currently restricted to Outlook’s desktop app and as such is not yet part of the browser variation of Microsoft’s mail service, we would highly recommend caution when drafting emails in either app.
The last thing we would want is readers sending regrettable emails from Outlook on the web browser and worried about the instant delivery of their email to the recipient.
For now, we can only hope that Microsoft incorporates this feature on the web version of Outlook just like Google has in gmail.
(via AddictiveTips)
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