Google’s ‘undo send’ option for Gmail is now officially available to all users, both enterprise and individuals. As the name suggests, it allows users to unsend an email that they’ve already sent to someone, by mistake or otherwise. The undo send link will appear at the top of the screen after you have sent an email accompanied by a 'view message' link. Users can pick a time period, which ranges between five and 30 seconds, for clicking on this link. In case you’re wondering, after clicking send, your email won’t actually be sent before this time period is over. Once you click undo, the email appears again in a 'Compose' box on your Gmail screen, and you can decide what to do with it.
There’s a good chance you’ve already been using this for a while. The undo send option was in Gmail's Labs tab for a long time, six years actually, and many have enabled this already. The option has now just been made public and brought into the main Gmail Settings tab. To activate the option, you have to click on the gear menu on the top right of your screen and choose Settings. Scroll down from here and find the Undo Send option. You can then enable it and choose the time period for the feature.
The undo send option though is unique to Gmail, and competing webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo don’t have it yet. In fact, undo send isn’t even Google’s first attempt at preventing emails from being sent by mistake. In 2008, the company had tried out an option called Mail Goggles, which asked users to solve math problems before they could send an email. This was designed to prevent late night drunk emails but was discontinued in 2012.