Google rolled out an Undo Send option on its email service Gmail that allows users to retract any accidentally sent emails within a specific time period.
The option, which can be found under the 'Settings' menu, allows the user to choose between a window of 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds in which they can retrieve a sent message.
The feature works by holding back the email for a certain amount of time before letting it go if the user does not indicate it was sent in error.
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The Guardian has already heralded the new feature as "an end to email shame", while the Washington Post refers to it as "a great miracle". However, Peter Fleming, writing for BBC Magazine, questions whether 30 seconds was long enough. "Rather than [the button] relieving us of anxiety one can imagine it actually mounting as we watch the 30-second countdown," he says.
Here are five people who would have found the feature very useful:
No longer top secret
Not even the most powerful country in the world is immune to making an email blunder. In May 2014, it emerged that the identity of the CIA's top officer in Kabul had been revealed on a list of officials emailed to major news organisations by the White House before Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan. The identity of CIA operatives is normally never disclosed by the US government. However The Guardian reported that the White House hadn't even noticed until it was brought to their attention by one of the news organisations.
Simply the worst
Oxford University made a serious blunder in 2014 when an internal staff list of its 50 worst performing students was sent to hundreds of students erroneously. The university quickly asked students to delete the email but the damage was already done, with one student saying: "I was gutted after my results, but didn't realise I would be publicly humiliated."
Good day to bury bad news
Following the 11 September attacks in 2001, Jo Moore, an advisor to Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, sent out an email to staff claiming the day was "now a very good day to bury bad news". Needless to say when the email was leaked to the press, Moore faced a huge public backlash. Although she managed to keep her job initially, she eventually resigned in the following February.
The 'replyallcalypse'
When a student at New York University accidentally clicked 'reply-all' instead of 'forward' to a message from the bursar office, he managed to email 40,000 students. The simple accident resulted in 24 hours of emails to every student at the university, a number of whom then seized the chance to email the whole student body themselves. It only stopped when the whole system had to be deleted.
Stephen Hawkin or Stephen Hawking
A simple misspelling of the recipient's name can be devastating. This was certainly the case when an engineer decided to send an email to a tardy colleague named Stephen Hawkin, which read: "Come on get your finger out, I haven't got time to be sitting here all day waiting for you, get on with it!" Unfortunately, earlier that day, the sender had also written a missive to the author of A Brief History of Time, in which he'd questioned one of the book's major points. Hawkin became Hawking and a jokey hurry-up email to a friend became a rude follow-up email to one of the most brilliant minds on the planet.
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