- Published on
How to unsend a Gmail email
- Authors
- Name
- interglobalmedia
- @letsbsocial1
I was under the impression that only the iMessages app on macOS Ventura provided the undo send feature. Well, apparently, it is becoming a āthingā everywhere. But an interesting fact I just found out, was that Gmail has had this
feature for
quite a long time! Man, I wish I had known about this
back in
the day!
The undo send email feature in
Gmail for
Web was officially rolled out in
2015, but for
six years prior to the launch, it was available as
experimental feature. Shows how much attention I was paying to Gmail intricacies at the time! Teaching others makes one much more hyper aware of what is available at oneās fingertips, so to speak! However, while it was an experimental feature, you did have to manually enable Gmail Labs in order to gain access to it.
Unsending an email in Gmail is very simple. After you send an email to someone via Gmail Web, the following appears:
When I click āUndo", the following appears:
However, what does not seem to be stated anywhere, is that the unsent email is not forever deleted, it reverts to a draft!
So in
order to get rid of
it forever, you have to go into your Gmail āDraftsā folder and permanently delete
it there!
The unsent email appears in
the āDraftsā folder. Something like the following:
In the early days of
the feature, you have to manually enable it in
your Gmail settings. Now, it is enabled by default
. And there is no option to turn it off. Why would you want to anyway?
The default
delay for unsending a Gmail email is 5 seconds. But that really does not necessarily give you time to think about whether you want to unsend the email or not! I set it to the longest period of
time possible, which is 30 seconds. In order to change the delay period, you have to click on the āGearā icon in
your Gmail for web, and the following appears:
THEN, you have to click on āSee all settingsā. And the following appears:
As you can see, within the General tab, which is where you are directed to by default
, is the Unsend option. I selected ā30 secondsā, but the following options are also available:
If you have set up your macOS Mail app to receive your Gmail emails, when you unsend an email there, it will also be reverted to a draft. You will have to go into your āDraftsā folder there and manually delete the draft as well.
I will also be writing a post on unsending a Gmail email on iPhone. The UX there is a bit different, and I found it especially important to increase the delay period to the max available, because otherwise, if the period is too short, like 5 seconds for example, there is a chance you donāt even see the āUndo Sendā pop up appear.
Happy unsending Gmail emails!