RSSMuch ado about undo: A new Gmail feature literally lasts five seconds
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published March 20, 2009, 10:45 AM
In perhaps another sterling demonstration of the effectiveness of Google's own product announcements by way of its blog posts, the world awakened this morning to an experimental capability in Google's Gmail that, if you think about it, you wonder why no one's thought about it before: An independent developer with the handle Yuzo F is distributing a Gmail add-on that gives users five seconds after clicking on the Send button to click on an Undo link that stops distribution from going forward.
"This feature can't pull back an e-mail that's already gone," writes Google UX designer Michael Leggett this morning, "it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry -- if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message."
Leggett said we could find the Undo Send feature in Gmail under Settings. Technically, that's correct, but it's not exactly the most prominent item on the menu: Since it's an experimental feature, we actually had to locate it -- amid dozens of other such features -- on the Labs tab under Settings. In our trials, we noted that we indeed had five seconds to hit Undo, so the amount of time was not being determined by some server process but by a holding procedure on the client side.
Man.. I could of used this feature a few times. I really screwed up a deal I was doing because I fired an email off to the wrong person. Oh well, I used this system now ( http://tinyurl.com/cmxxzz ) and income is not a problem for me anymore. I don't even work anymore actually, just a little book keeping and admin occasionally.
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|great! now why won't google fix the damn `noname' issue I get with numerous attachments??? Friends that have Gmail accounts forward me attachments and they show up in my Gmail account as `noname' with no extension. This has been ongoing for well over a year...
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|AOL had the feature long ago, back in the 90's. AOL would allow you to unsend any e-mail that was sent to an @aol.com address. Since it was the 90's, most e-mail addresses did end in aol.com. Exchange also supports the feature. Not too exciting.
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|I was going to say that I remembered that.
It also allowed for notifications of when the user had read (not only recieved, but read) the email you sent too.
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|That is completely different, and if you had any idea how email actually worked you might understand why this feature is pretty cool.
AOL offered an unsend feature only when you sent a message to someone at aol...because, they manage all aol email accounts, so when you unsend they can just remove the message from that persons mailbox. Exchange has a similar feature as long as your exchange server manages the destination mailbox. If you send to an external address, the second you hit send that message is gone, no going back. What google is doing is just holding the message in a queue for 5 seconds to let you unsend the message no matter what the destination address is. Pretty nice if you accidentaly sent a message about how much you hate your boss to your boss instead of your friend...
I don't use gmail that much, but it's a pretty good idea, I think.
Also...most mail clients allow you to send a receipt confirmation and a read confirmation...however most mail clients also let you know that the sender is asking for a read confirmation email, and ask you if you want to send one or not. I don't know anybody that actually opts to send out the confirmation...
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|@Niro: I'm well aware it's a different thing. And yes, I know about it. I was saying that AOL also gave out 'email has been read' information, on top of the 'taking back a sent mail' feature. There was no option to disallow the 'email has been read' information (as far as I can remember) at the recipient end.
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|"In our trials, we noted that we indeed had five seconds to hit Undo, so the amount of time was not being determined by some server process but by a holding procedure on the client side."
Huh? It has to be on the server, otherwise the e-mail wouldn't be sent if the browser crashes. And why would it have to be on the client? It's not like time runs at different speeds at different locations. Five seconds for the server is going to be five seconds for the client. While the client is likely counting down a display or something it's the server that is actually waiting five seconds to send out the e-mail, and listening for a cancel signal from the client. At least, that's how I'd do it.
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|That's easy, because client-server turnaround costs time. So it's easier and faster to cancel on the client.
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