Back before I got banned for life from AOL, I remember that there was a feature where you could retrieve or pull back an email you had sent, as long as it hadn’t been read or opened by the recipient. But once they had opened it, you couldn’t retract anything.
Last night I was sending a Paypal payment to an ebay seller who is on AOL. There was a slight mix-up because the shipping fee didn’t carry over from one screen to the next, and I sent a payment without the shipping fee. I then spent a few minutes trying to send a second payment for the shipping, and when I succeeded, I went back to my email to check the receipts. There was an email from the seller, telling me I had forgotten the shipping. I opened the email, read it, and then figured since she was online and monitoring things pretty closely she’d see the second payment and email me again. I went to bed.
When I got up this morning, there was no email from her, but the one she had sent last night was gone. I hadn’t deleted it, so she must have sucked it back into the ether, but how is that possible if I had opened it? Is there a time limit with AOL? How can she yank back one I’ve opened?
I have SBC Yahoo…all the mail stays in one big heap until I move it (sort of like the pile on the kitchen table) though it does change color when you read it. And last night’s email is definitely not there.
Assuming that AOL still has this feature, it’d only apply to other AOL accounts; the sender wouldn’t have the option to retrieve the e-mail from your non-AOL mail account.
Be sure to check your SPAM, Bulk Mail and Trash folders just in case.
I checked all those folders…it’s not there. I didn’t imagine this email, and I didn’t delete it. The computer was very sluggish last night, taking forever to go from page to page. Could she have yanked it back as Unread before my computer registered that I had read it? This is very bizarre. I may ask my brother, who is on AOL, to do A little test with me this weekend and see if we can recreate this.
The others are correct. An AOL member can “unsend” an email sent to another AOL member if it hasn’t yet been read because the message is on AOL’s servers. How would AOL be able to remove a message that’s on a Yahoo server?
I recall (i.e. cancel) messages occasionally at work, using Microsoft Outlook. Works fairly well within the company. I happened to notice one day that if you attempt to recall a message sent over the Internet Outlook just sends a canned e-mail message that says something to the effect “Joe Blow would like to cancel message such and such” (sorry - I can’t remember the exact phrasing).
I’m not saying that kittenblue is correct (and I am also not saying that he/she is incorrect), but maybe there is a standard for such cancellation messages that other servers could recognize? I didn’t think there was, but maybe there is.
No, there’s no standard. MS Outlook can do it as long as all recipients are on the same Exchange server as the sender, but that’s the same scenario as AOL.
Now to me, that makes sense!! I’ve decided to email this ebayer and ask her about this…can’t stand a mystery, you see! I have no idea if she’ll respond, but it would be nice to know if she did try to retract the email from her end.
As to why I am banned for life from AOL…shortly after Columbine, my then-young-teenage son was IM’ing some people, and got into a little verbal snit with one person. The phrase “if you don’t (…talk, respond, answer…) I’ll kill you” was used, and the other person (also young, teenaged) decided to report the IM to AOL, who decided it was a “serious death threat”, not a “harmless turn of phrase” even though my son had no idea who this person really was or where they were. So I woke up the next morning to discover my AOL service cancelled, all my emails and addresses lost, and no explanation from AOL at all. When I called them to find out what was going on, they told me I could never have AOL service again because “in light of the current climate we can’t let people use that kind of language”. I asked the rep if he had ever in his life told anyone “oh, I’m so mad I could just kill you for that” and he said that was not the point.
I still regularly get invitations from AOL to join or upgrade, and occasionally I call, just to see what will happen, and everything’s fine for a few minutes until the little flag on my file pops up, and then they tell me they don’t want me. And then I ask them why they keep sending me invitations, and they say there is no way to flag my account to not get them. Silly people.
Talk about flying off the handle, that is a ridiculous reason to get banned from an ISP in my opinion. They did you a favour though, AOL are the spawn of Satan (again, just my opinion).
As for your e-mail disappearing I would go along with the computer “brain fart” theory, computers aren’t perfect and occasionally things got lost and mixed up.