We’ve all done it: sent an email to the wrong person or sent an email written in the heat of the moment and regretted it almost immediately after clicking the send button. Fortunately you don’t have to worry anymore if you use Gmail. The ‘undo’ email sending button has just gone through a new innovation. Now this button gives you thirty seconds to undo sending an email. So you no longer have to worry if you send an email to the wrong person or the wrong message to the right person.
Most people don’t even know this button exists. It used to be a button which gives you five seconds to make the email unsent. But for most of us this is just not enough time. Google labs is still testing this thirty seconds regret button but you can already use it. This button is one of the many experimental features that Gmail users can download on the Gmail Labs website.
Here are some email blunders of people who better could have used the instant regret button:
- Jonas L. Blank, an intern at a prestigious New York law firm, wrote an email to a friend but on accident he sends it to forty people at the firm, including twenty partners. In the email he typed: ‘’Went to a nice 2hr sushi lunch today. Spent the rest of the day typing emails and bullshitting with people’’. Not really a proactive attitude.
- In an email a senior law associate asked a secretary to reimburse him £4 pound for getting ketchup on his trousers. Combine this with the secretary’s mother who died and you have a serious PR problem on your hands. Both are given leave from work until the email row blows over.
- It’s not very wise to send an angry email to all of your colleagues if it’s your last day at work. And you know it’s awful when it requires you to make a post-employment apology to your former colleagues. An end like: If I had to work here again in this lifetime, I would sooner kill myself’ is not the way to leave a proper image of yourself.