The Internet, email and mobile devices are the most essential connectors in today’s workplace. Between meeting alerts, necessary attachments, and up-to-date correspondence, most of us depend heavily on email in our work-a-day world.
And most of us also have sent embarrassing or regrettable emails: whether in the heat of the moment, when tired, or with an inadvertent ‘Reply All’ – or even, in some cases, hitting send to the wrong person entirely.
These days, when we’re all on tablets and smartphones we’re even more apt to make a mistake with our emails, when writing on the go or “trying” to multitask…and the email autocorrect kicks in. You probably have your own favorite funny and cringing email mistakes due to the ‘helpful’ autocorrect feature in email.
Humor aside, misplaced or poorly worded emails are a major issue for the workplace. One study by an enterprise email provider in 2013, found that 64% of people blamed unintended email for causing anger or confusion in the workplace; 43% found that this communication tool also was the most likely (above phones, IM, and text, for example) to cause resentment between senders and receivers.
Just this past month, Google officially launched its “Undo Send” feature for users of its Gmail accounts. The delete-that-email feature had been available for the past year in beta, housed in its Google Labs section.
If you tried Undo Send via Gmail Labs, your Undo Send setting now will be on by default.
Otherwise, you will find that you can easily enable the Undo Send feature in your Gmail settings. You can even set your system to have up to thirty seconds to review your message before you send. For details, go here.
For many years, users of Microsoft Exchange Server-based email systems have had the opportunity to recall and replace their emails. But most home and personal email users, and many small business accounts do not use Microsoft Exchange. And, in order, to recall your message, the recipient of the e-mail message that you want to recall also must be using an Exchange account. You can’t recall a message sent to an outside email system, such as someone’s POP3 e-mail account.
There are an estimated 900 million Gmail users, and almost 25% say they use the service during work hours. Some estimates place the number of mid-sized business users of Gmail at 60%. You can do the math and see that the new Undo Send feature of Gmail will be a valuable tool to the workplace.
Unsend? I’m all for it! But, of course, we should all still review our emails before we hit send…