Cancel the sending of an email with Gmail

When writing an email, there are times when you too quickly press the "Send" button, and once this has been done, there is no getting it back. The message could contain a lot of mistakes (not great when it’s a job application), it could be incomplete (you may have forgotten the attachments, or even the message subject) or even overly aggressive (it’s best not to write when you are upset over something). Such messages will then arrive at their destination a few seconds later, to be read by the receiver when you perhaps didn’t want this to be the case. To avoid such issues, the Gmail service offers a nice function, although you have to activate it as it is still in the experimental phase.

From the Gmail interface, click on the cog wheel to the top right and select "Labs" from the menu that appears.

In this new page, find the "Cancel sending" function and choose "Activate" with the help of the radio button next to it, before scrolling to the bottom of the page to confirm the change.

As you can see in the screen capture below, it is now possible to cancel the sending of an email by simply clicking on the link.

According to the tests that we have performed, this service seems to work quite well. Emails that have been sent are cancelled and never arrived at their destination.