It is adjustable (from the main settings page after you enable it) but the only options for me are 0 and 5. Zero?

Anyway, they are probably going to introduce 10, according to this article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10200370-2.html

...but Coleman also told me there's an option to increase the un-send time window to 10 seconds. "We may decide to add longer options," he said.

If it's being sent to a gmail address, why not allow the user to undo it as long as the receiver has not looked at it yet?

I'd stop using Gmail, personally. To me, it feels like the receiver has a right to read an email he receives. It would feel... intrusive... for the app to decide to delete some of my data when I'm not looking (or rather when I haven't looked yet).

That said, the "panic button" undo feature seems like a great idea. But 5 seconds is way too short. (I'm envisioning my Dad using this feature in this case, not a techie.) 30 seconds seems perfect -- it's probably not a big deal that your message gets delayed by 30 seconds, and it gives you some 'think time' to remember a detail you forgot to add or fix.

If no one sees an email in their inbox, is it really there?

filters run

Privacy. It would become something like a read receipt.

The recipient could disable this, then.

By default, Gmail tells you when your contacts are online anyway... so if you want to see if someone is reading their email, you can just click their name and send them an IM. This doesn't invade their privacy any more than that does.

(BTW, the undo conditional should be "seen", not read. Basically, if the recipient has logged into Gmail since you've sent the message, undo should not work.)

I use my gmail accounts via IMAP. You can't see me when I'm logged in.

Then IMAP could count as "seeing" too.

Give up, this is a horrible idea.

Emails can be forwarded automatically, notification of new emails can be sent to mobile devices, they can be tagged/labeled/moved/starred, add-ons or third party apps can screen scrape and process that information... all without a message being tagged as "read" and some of these without even being logged in.

If you want to implement a think-it-over delay in your client, go right ahead. If you want to arrange something with your provider (Gmail) to be able to stop delivery (a la UPS) then go right ahead, but you're going to have to be mighty quick.

Once its in my inbox, however, it's mine. Any provider who would do such a thing would certainly loose me as a subscriber. Your best bet is a nicely worded apology letter.

Would you really go to the effort of telling all your contacts you have a new e-mail address if Google added this feature?

I doubt it.

I use google apps for my email, so I own my email address.

Stop doubting :)

Hmmm... Maybe they could add an automatic "send apology" button...

You could make it a limited resource. You could only do this say once a month per recipient.

That's a stupid idea. This isn't a turn based game. What the hell would once a month per recipient do for you? It wouldn't be a useful tool if it didn't provide value to the user at all times. What happens if I screw up much more than one time? Great, I was saved once, but that really didn't do much.

And as for the original idea, it's stupid too. When I browse my inbox, I know exactly what's there, opened and unopened. Once it's sent to me, it's mine. I don't want to see messages appearing/disappearing from my inbox if it's not me doing the manipulating.

I'm all for brainstorming and developing new ideas, but come on, give these ideas some thought.

Why is this modded down to -3? This isn't trolling or spam, this is a legitimate suggestion.

If you disagree, you need to post a comment, not click the downmod button. HN is not Digg.

Probably because it's such a weird/dumb suggestion it is hard to distinguish from a troll.

If it's past the 5 second point and it is to a gmail address, then it could try to undo without telling you if it was successful.

That would be of little use; you couldn't resend or assume that they had or hadn't seen it. It would be no better than not having any undo at all.

For one thing, because it would give you an incentive not to receive mail at gmail.

This makes me feel old, but AOL used to do this way back in the day.

The old managers at my company have talked wistfully of the pre-Lotus Notes email system that allowed you to yank emails out of someone's inbox - if they had not yet clicked to read them yet.

I think that feature would be abused.

Exactly what kind of abuse do you have in mind?

Currently, my mailbox is so full of junk that if someone wants to send me less mail, I'm extasic.

Really, crying wolf about privacy is one thing, but give me a realistic example.

The worse example would be the silent withdrawal of an offer for a contract (not that anyone would do that)

I usually notice the problem just after clicking on the send button so 5 seconds would be plenty of time for me. I conjecture most people are like that.

I agree that we all notice the problem immediately after clicking the send button.

The question is, would having an X second delay cause that moment of realization to shift to the point right after the delay has run out? I bet it would.

Then no amount of customization of the delay would make any difference.

Exactly; my instinct is that it would increase initial perceived value, but it wouldn't have a permanent impact.

It's more a concern that I'd have both hands on the keyboard and the mouse cursor somewhere unknown over several screens ... and not being able to hit undo fast enough, rather than not realising in 5 seconds.

Enable keyboard shortcuts. Hit `z'.

I would never need more than 5 seconds, because by then I will have switched to the next activity and cleared the email from my in-brain queue anyway.

Typical use cases are where you notice just while hitting Send that you: promised a link but didn't actually paste it in; sent mail to a bunch of people and instead of bcc-ing spammed everyone with the whole addressee list; were on auto-pilot and signed mail to your boss with "xx"...

...lots of things that can be caught in 5 seconds. Most of the time I actually just forgot to mention something - so I think undo-send is not so much a service to senders but rather to recipients, who would otherwise have to deal with a higher number of emails.

Well, it seems to be only a Labs feature... I guess it will be improved in the future.

One thing I don't like about many of the things in Google labs is the lack of settings like that. I also don't like that there is no way to set how much offline data Gears will store.

I have the same problem with Google Earth. What labels, points and such it shows seems to depend on the position and shape of the moon rather than on the position of the screen and the zoom level. Sometimes I want to see something (like a village's name) that I just know is there but I have to center the screen on something next to it and then try a couple of zoom levels to see if I can make it show up.

Also, Picasa with its smooth scrolling. I try to scroll somewhere by dragging the scrollbar or clicking it and instead of scrolling where I drag or click it, it scrolls smoothly (read: slowly) at a top speed of maybe three pages per second. Aargh!

Oh yeah, Google Earth has this too: when you click the N on the compass to realign your screen with the cardinal directions, they thought it would be neat to make it turn really really smoothly. And it seems the closer your screen is to perfect alignment, the slower it turns.

The frustrating part is that Google should know this and make it configurable. I have no idea why they refuse to do this all the time. (Though I haven't used their stuff in a while so I have no idea if it's been fixed by now.)