It sounds like they've done some research to back up their 5 second logic.<p>I had my own method of "undo" that I've been using - I simply put GMail in offline mode when I am batch replying to emails. Then before I send, I do a quick glance at my outbox. If everything looks good, I go back into online mode<p>Before this I was just saving as drafts, but that seemed a little messy.<p>I do wish this was configurable though. It would be nice if I could set it to perhaps 10 minutes with some sort of override (e.g., I am on the phone or chatting with someone right now and I am trying to send them directions or something). Most of my emails are not <i>that</i> time sensitive anyway.
By the way, is there a feature in Gmail such that it would remind me about an e-mail if it is not replied to? For example if I ask a client "should the icon be in cornflower blue?" I'd like to be reminded if they haven't replied to it in X hours.
Lots of people have pointed out several possible improvements to this feature. Now if we could anticipate these things with a few minutes of contemplation (each), I'm sure Google would have come up with the same list of gripes.<p>But obviously, they did some tradeoff analysis and decided to do what they did.<p>Now, from a technical standpoint, the fact that they implemented this feature in the present way results in <i>some</i> information of their internal infrastructure and engineering organization to leak through.<p>The 5 second, non-configurable timeout should allow us to speculate a little bit on what Gmail's architecture is.<p>The only reason I can think of is that maybe the undo operation results in a scan over <i>all</i> queued email for all users. This is obviously an expensive operation, so maybe they cannot easily increase this delay with their current architecture. They'll have to add per-user queues on their servers. Maybe that's too big an engineering project at present.<p>What do you think?<p>Microsoft Outlook has had a sophisticated version of this for a long time. I know a guy who had set up Outlook to send <i>all</i> his email 30 min after he hit send. You can even schedule a message for sending at an arbitrary time (i.e., per-message level granularity of send delay).<p>For instance, the Microsoft Outlook implementation of this feature essentially implies that each client can queue up emails for later delivery on the server and <i>later</i> interrogate this queue in a sophisticated way (i.e., it's not fire and forget).
If this was MS they would also add a feature that sends an email when you cancel one, saying something like "bonaldi tried to recall message x".<p>Exchange does that for non-MAPI clients, which always sends you racing to read whatever it was you weren't supposed to see. Great thinking.
is it me or is their approach stupid as hell?<p>wouldn't it make more sense simply not to process sending the email for a specific user-specified time?<p>i.e. automatically you don't send email for 10 seconds, but a user can go to preferences and setup the undo feature for 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min etc.<p>I mean 5 seconds is pretty much useless...its more or less the "oh shit, I forgot an attachment", but there is really no difference for user between 5 seconds or 5 minutes, and I'm fairly sure most people, given the choice, would select the 5 minute delay.
I don't really see the logic in this. It seems like the typical workflow they're imagining goes something like:<p><pre><code> 1. Compose email to A-list investor
2. Hit send
3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
4. Kill self
</code></pre>
So now they're trying to make this the workflow:<p><pre><code> 1. Compose email to A-list investor
2. Hit send
3. Realize that you forgot to attach the deck
4. Hit undo and fix problem
</code></pre>
All well and good, but step #3 requires you to look over your email and realize you made a mistake. Why not just do that <i>before</i> you hit send?
I think 10 seconds would be the sweet spot. I mean, the moment of panic usually comes about 3 seconds after you hit send. leaving 2 seconds for the actual click.
It does not seem to work. I sent an email to myself, immediately hit undo. It told me that the action was undone, but there was a new email sitting waiting for me.
Microsoft Exchange introduced this feature years ago.<p>I once did mistake of sending mail to wrong person in my university and within seconds of clicking "send" I'd realized what I'd done as well as the consequences of it. I rushed to the sys admin who calmly said "No problem, we'll take it out from queue. On average a message, outside our domain, takes fiteen MINUTES to get dispatched!". And he removed mine from the queue. This was back in 2002.
I wonder if the Mail Goggles idea was a spinoff of the the undo idea: <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html" rel="nofollow">http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sendi...</a>. Generally seems like the same dilemma. Does the recipient have a right to your drunken email?
Strange... without the undo feature you will need to send another e-mail to that person or another time the same e-mail to the right person. In this way google will display more ads and earn more money... maybe it will be a 'pay for undo', or a 'this undo was sponsorized by ___'
Cool! I guess this is as close as it's going get to my pet feature request: a preview feature for emails. (I absolutely suck at scanning text for errors in a textbox.)