Every business owner who uses email has had that cringe-worthy experience—the moment when you click on the send button, and then realize your email has an error or two, or 10.
Alex Kopicki knows what that's like. Kopicki, co-founder of Baltimore, Maryland-based Kinglet, a commercial real estate platform, explains that his 17-month-old daughter enjoys looking at the pictures on his iPhone.
"On more than one occasion, she has managed to land on the return button while I'm in mid-email," he says.
That's why Google's announcement this week that it is, after several years in public beta, offering an Undo Send as a formal setting in Gmail, will likely be a stress-reducing benefit for many business owners.
To turn on Undo Send in Gmail, go to the settings menu and click on "Enable Undo Send," and you can set a cancellation period of 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds. During that period, if you panic and realize you shouldn't have sent the email, click "Undo" (you'll see a little yellow bar at the top of the screen after you send the email that you can click on) and stop it from going out.
Still, Undo Send probably won't be a game changer, claims Joel Kline, a professor of digital communications at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. "Corporate email services, such as MS Outlook, have had recall message features for many years," Kline explains. And there are other editing features that other communications companies have produced. For instance, Dasher, a messaging app for texting, allows the sender to edit the text after it's been sent. So while the receiver may get the wrong information, you can at least correct it for later viewings.
If you're sending error-prone emails or texts far too often, rather than relying on these tools, here are three strategies to consider when you write your next email.
1. Don't Rush
You still need to read your emails carefully. Scott Willyerd, owner of Dick Jones Communications, a PR firm in McMurray, Pennsylvania, still cringes when he thinks about an email he wrote a few years ago in which he asked a client to "sit in on a meeting."
"There was an unfortunate 'h' between the 's' and the 'i','" says Willyerd, who only discovered the typo after it was later pointed out to him. "The client laughed it off, but I didn't do myself any favors."
2. Check Who You're Sending To
Kline thinks a bigger problem for emailers is "sending messages to the wrong people; for example, hitting 'reply all' instead of an individual."
Dasher's co-founder, Jesse Boyes, recalls when he worked at another company and his HR director accidentally emailed a spreadsheet full of salary information not to the HR staff but the entire company's staff.
"I don't think I've seen someone try to recall a message more quickly and desperately in my life," Boyes says.
3. Don't Rely on Technology to Save You
You could get a phone call just after you hit send, distracting you from using the Undo Send button. Or the Internet might go out, right after you hit send and before you can undo it. You might forget that this is only for sending Gmail from a desktop and not yet offered on your smartphone and send off a hastily written email from your cell and then realize you can't undo it. Or you might try to stop the email after 31 seconds instead of 30.
Don't rely on this tool too much, because once the email is gone, it's gone. "There's no way for Google to recall a message that has already left its server and gone to someone on a non Google platform," says Andy Abramson, CEO of Comunicano, a PR firm in San Diego. "You should never write and send anything that can come back to haunt you. Sometimes it's better to not send than have to rely on something like Undo Send."
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