I requested some accident reports from our County Sheriff, and the clerk sent me several emails of the accident forms. About an hour later, she emailed me several times again, and the subject line was “Recall: accident reports.” The body of the email only said "[clerk’s name] would like to recall the message, “X set of Y accidents”.
The clerk called me and said she had forgotten to redact some critical data that the public was not supposed to have, and she attempted to recall them, but it didn’t work.
How is it possible, once sent, for the sender to recall an email that the receiver has already received? The clerk said it would have worked only if I hadn’t read them, so it sounds like she had experience with this before or thought she was doing a valid procedure.
As it was, I copied the attached reports to my computer, so I’m very sure she couldn’t recall those. (They make very interesting reading!)
So if I had not read them and not copied them, how could she have removed them from my mailbox? Was she mistaken?
Some internal systems (e.g., within a company) enable an email to be recalled. But in my experience this works only if the recipient allows the recall. I think there is a link to click inside a second email authorizing the recall if I remember correctly.
I don’t believe there is any way to recall an email once it goes outside of teh local system.
E-mail can be recalled. A message is sent out that basically has the recall request in it. The catch is that your e-mail system has to recognize and process those recall messages in order for it to work. If your e-mail system handles it, the message is deleted off of the e-mail server. As you’ve noted, if you save the message to your computer somewhere the recall won’t delete your local copy. If your e-mail system doesn’t handle recall messages it won’t work either.
Microsoft exchange servers process recalls. Most ISP e-mail systems don’t.
Those recall messages are a feature of Microsoft Exchange. It works when both parties are on the same Exchange server (i.e. you both work for the same company), but even then I believe you can configure your mail client (usually Microsoft Outlook in that case) to ignore them, or to ask for confirmation before deleting the message.
Maybe some other mail clients also support them, but it’s certainly not a universally respected standard, an even clients which support it usually allow you to decline the recall. In that case, the ‘recall’ message basically serves as a big flashing neon sign saying “Hey! There is something interesting about my previous mail!”
I suspect the sender in this case was on a government server, and my domain is hosted on GoDaddy. Nothing on my end involves Microsoft; it’s strictly Linux and GoDaddy’s proprietary email software. Unlikely that they would talk nice to each other, and that’s a good thing in this case.
The clerk promised to re-send me the same data, but redacted. It should be interesting to see what she removes, as I have the originals well-preserved.
Sure are a lot of drunks on the road, and some of them are my good neighbors.
It’s been a long time (I last used Outlook and an Exchange server in 2007), but as I recall the sender and recipient didn’t have to be on the same Exchange server. I’m pretty sure I was sometimes able to recall messages sent off-site as long as the recipient was on an Exchange server, not necessarily the same server I was using.
(anyone remember a late 90s commercial with the panicked ‘unsend unsend unsend!’ in it? I don’t remember enough to find it, or even enough to remember if it was a good commercial or not.)
Yep. I always compare the original and the new version.
One I remember was an email about a run for breast cancer awareness/fundraising. The poster was down at the bottom, where you’d have to scroll to see it, but some of the team names shown on it were like “Tatas for Tina”, or somewhat more risque. Nothing really outrageous, but not really appropriate for a work email approved and sent by HR.
Usually it’s the wrong attachment or even failing to attach the file at all that people in our office try to recall.
Using Exchange server and Outlook client, it doesn’t work particularly well, but I remember when we used Groupwise email, that a recall could zap those wrong messages right out of sight without the putative recipient even knowing you’d sent it if they hadn’t opened the message.
I think that was the early 2000s, either way yeah, it was for an IBM Thinkpad. A guy in an office is busily writing his boss an angry email complaining how everyone’s been issued a new laptop except him. Just as he hits SEND he notices a tech next to him who says, “I’m setting up your new Thinkpad” so the guy furiously starts typing and shouting, “UNSEND UNSEND!”
I used to work in the IT dept for a hospital/medical center. We used MS Exchange and you could sometimes recall a sent email. A few things:
[ul]
[li]It had to have been sent only within our local intranet (network), if it went external it was gone.[/li][li]It could only be recalled if the user had not opened it yet.[/li][li]If the user had left themselves signed on to Windows and left Outlook running you could only successfully recall it if it was *before *Outlook’s automatic Inbox check grabbed it (usually every 5 mins).[/li][/ul]
I worked third shift so I used recall more than once (nothing angry, just later got more/different info). At first I didn’t understand why more often than not it still didn’t work even though most users weren’t there at night. Like I said, it was because people who didn’t share a PC with anyone would just lock their desktop at day’s end and leave everything running (Outlook included).