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You made a mistake. Not a true CLM that wrecks projects and reputations, but you sent an email to a person and regret it. What do you do?
This was a question on one of our quizzes and many participants fell into the trap. It was the only answer where a majority of participants picked the wrong answer, so we'll have to talk about it.
Read receipts: are annoying emails that get sent by the receiver back to the sender. They still exist in Gmail, but wisely Google does not allow to request read receipts for every email sent. Notes had that and it drove me nuts.
Ask the recipient to disregard it: The sobering truth.
Encrypt the email and revoke the key: This would be the correct answer (consumer Gmail does it), but it's not yet available for enterprise clients.
Set an expiration date for the email: This is a variation of the previous answer (auto-revocation). Why did so many fall for this?
But in Notes you could... Or could you?
But in Notes you could... Or could you?
I will let you in on a dirty industry secret: No email client can revoke emails. Never could. To my knowledge, there are two ways of "recalling" an email:
Option 1: Not sending the actual email, but a link to the content. The content will stay on the sender's server and to access it requires some form of "asking for permission" every time. This is what Google's confidential mode does (plus some clever tricks).
Option 2: A function in the email program that "respects" calls for deleting content. This is what Outlook and Notes do. It relies on the fact that the recipient's email program behaves. No problem for company-internal emails, but say you emailed a client. You don't know what program they use, how it is configured etc. What happens when the recipient is on mobile and lost connectivity? You must assume that your email is "out in the wild".
Pseudo-option: Gmail lets you "undo sending", which is in fact a 5-30 second delay for every email you send. Clicking "undo" will interrupt this countdown. After that, your email is on its own and cannot be "undone".
So what should you do?
So what should you do?
It depends on how bad the situation is... You may send a "please disregard", an apology or flowers. You may need to inform your boss, your client or the legal department (and only then HR...). But there's nothing IT can do for you, especially if the email was sent to somebody outside of your company.
May you never be in such a situation - that's why Gmail has made the "Undo Send" feature mandatory (5 seconds). You can adjust it you are prone to remorse (not that I would be...). Thanks for reading!
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