What prompted this was an email subject line I saw in my web mail inbox, something about a judge in a conservative state who had reversed her prior block on gender-affirming treatment. I don’t usually read that political filler material but I was curious and it’s a slow day so I clicked on it… only to be told by my web mail environment that an error occurred and this message actually does not exist.
So I checked Eudora: I have my actual email client configured to (eventually) delete email from the server after fetching it as POP mail. But the email hadn’t landed anywhere in Eudora either. (Yeah, I checked the Trash, of course I did, that’s where I expected it to be, given my spam filters. But nope).
So, on onward to the question. Does there now exist an email protocol for unsending an email, such that the sender could have fetched it back, that would be respected by email recipient systems other than on a shared integrated email platform like one’s own company’s Microsoft Outlook / Exchange Server? I know the latter allows Employee #1 to unsend an email to Employee #2, but that’s because Employees #1 and #2 are both interacting with the same Exchange Server. But the event described above involved an email sent to my private email address.
I’m a recent and reluctant user of web mail only as a byproduct of my employer requiring a minimum OS that I don’t prefer to upgrade my primary everyday compute to, so for the first time in my life I’m sprawled out onto multiple different computers and hence I keep webmail open in lieu of remoting in via Timbuktu and remotely controlling my main personal-use computer and moving files back and forth to use as attachments and whatnot (pain in the butt). So since I haven’t been using web mail all along, maybe I missed the general arrival of an accepted protocol for unsending email?
I always thought once you’d clicked that Send button, the ony way to keep it out of the hands of the recipient would be to hack their email account and fetch it yourself and delete it. Or drive to their apartment, break in, and delete it out of their Inbox while they’re busy cooking supper or something.
I don’t know of anything like that for standard email. I guess it’s possible that your webmail provides that feature. What webmail client do you use? e.g. Gmail, Outlook (Live), Yahoo! Mail, etc.
One possibility I could think of is that the email got moved to your spam folder on your webmail client.
It’s my own private ISP’s web mail not one of those ‘platform’ emails like gmail, yahoo, etc; earthlink to be precise.
ETA: I checked the spam folder on webmail, not there. And I’d think it would land there and never arrive in my inbox rather than popping up in the inbox and then getting shuttled over to spam folder anyhow.
Does your (non-webmail) email client (ie thunderbird/outlook etc) download new emails from the server (and then delete them from the server)?
At one point I had thunderbird set up to download (and delete) incoming emails from the server. It worked fine, however, what would often happen is I’d hear my phone beep to indicate a new email and if I didn’t read it before thunderbird polled the server and grabbed it, I wouldn’t be able to access it on my phone. I’d have to get it from the desktop client.
Bottom line: there is no standard protocol for recalling a sent e-mail. Specific e-mail environments (such as GMail or Outlook/Exchange) have their own internal implementations but they don’t work outside their own monoculture.
And I cannot fathom Eudora going along with any of that unless it was an official IETF Standard.
And Gmail’s “undo” just works by delaying the sending of the email. You have like 10 seconds (by default) to click undo. The other person never sees the email if you click in that time period.
Yes, as I said. It’s Eudora. It downloads the email then after some # of hours it deletes those emails from server. If it had done all that, the email would be in Eudora somewhere. Doesn’t seem to be.
There exists one, but it’s empty. Never seen anything in there that I hadn’t put there myself, and I usually empty the trash immediately when I do.
Yeah, me either, and aside from that Eudora hasn’t been updated since Macs ran on PowerPC chips. So it would have had to have been a standard BACK THEN. Now, Earthlink on the other hand might conceivably adopt support for some such thing. But
Yeah that’s what I’ve always been told and continue to believe. Just checking. In case my info was out of date or something
I did a quick search of IETF standards tracks. There was an Internet-draft from Huawei in about 2009 proposing a standard for email recall, but AFAICT it died of disinterest.
I’ve seen this in the wild and there are probably a number of possible reasons for it - for example it sort of makes sense that a spam filtering engine that is learning to recognise spam based on reports from other mailboxes, should apply the latest result of the latest iteration of learning to existing messages that are already sitting in a customer’s inbox - especially if they are still unread, I suppose.
Another possibility is that there are multiple layers of spam filtering - for example if you use a mail client app on your mobile phone, that client might have its own filter configuration for spam (perhaps trained by your previous flagging as spam) - so a message might survive the spam filter on the server, only to be treated as spam once the mail client on the smartphone gets a look at it.
Whatever the cause though, I have seen it in happen on a popular webmail platform (outlook.com - where I was able to find the filtered message later in my spam folder) and on the hosted mail server for my own domain (where the only trace of the message was my memory of having glimpsed it briefly - it was nowhere to be found in any local or server folder)
Yeah, in some cases, all that happens is that the recipient received an email that says “Mangetout would like to unsend an email”, which is a disaster because it draws attention to the fact that there is some reason it should not exist.
I’ve seen advertisements for E-mail services that tout the E-mail you send will disappear or delete itself from your recipient’s folders after a set time. Does that really work?
There are so many options on modern email packages (like Outlook) that I can’t keep track of them all. And some interact with others and some take precedence over others. I suggest checking all the options on yours; there might be something that moved it, then deleted it after a short period of time, maybe a default option.
If you’re using Eudora and POP, then there is no telling what kind of weird glitch might happen when they interact with a modern email server. The current releases of mail servers probably do not test very much against Eudora and POP.
Also, no telling how Eudora is going to respond to some malformed html mess of something sent over email. I would not be surprised if some message caused Eudora to give an error and not properly download the message, and yet still download it enough to cause POP to delete it from the server. This goes double if the message was from some sort of news service sending out articles.
Having said all of that… Particular for phishing and other malicious emails (as opposed to plain old spam), many providers may delete messages from inboxes or spam folders after they have been delivered and later detected to be malicious.
I can think of something that could work. It couldn’t delete the email itself, but it could effectively blank it out.
Emails can contain embedded web pages. That’s how they can have fancy text and graphics and stuff. I could see having the email include the text as an image.
That is, of course, with standard email. Some webmail providers do have self-destruction messages, like with Gmail’s “Confidential mode”, which also lets you set a password.
I’ve never entered one, but I would guess that you would just get a link if you tried to send such a message to another email provider.