You might have just sent an email… and just realized you’ve made a terrible mistake, or your attachment is missing? With Gmail, you have the ability to cancel an email that has already been sent, but you don’t have time to do so. You have to react quickly.
Even though instant chat apps are prevalent on our mobile phones, classic email will still be essential. Especially in professional conversations or management exchanges.
It occurs to us several times on a daily basis that it is possible to cancel sending an email. But those little things go away very quickly… Fortunately, Gmail offers an option to remember an email that was sent by mistake.
Obviously, sending an email is almost instant, making it almost impossible to cancel by simply pressing the send button. Let’s be clear: there is no option to delete a message that has already arrived in the recipient’s mailbox.
But Gmail always gives a delay of a few seconds. This allows you to have a period of time during which you can still unsend messages.
This feature has been around for years. And if it was previously necessary to activate it during the beta phase, the functionality is now activated by default on all Gmail accounts. So you don’t have to do anything, unless you want to change the default delay time.
Here’s how to cancel sending an email on Gmail.
Warning: By default, you only have 5 seconds to undo. Once the message is sent, simply press the cancel button at the level of the black bubble that appears at the bottom of the screen (smartphone or PC).
How has the delay time changed?
- Go to Gmail.com and sign in to your account
- At the top right, click the gear button
- Click View all settings
- On the General tab, select Undo Send
- Click the dropdown field to set the cancellation time after sending. The default wait time is 5 seconds but you can increase the timeout to 10, 20 or 30 seconds.
Click Save changes at the very bottom of the page.
You now have more time to undo your emails if you make a mistake.
