How to Undo a Sent Email in Gmail

If  you accidentally sent an email prematurely before you were ready to send it, there’s a feature in Gmail that you can enable that allows you to undo a sent email within a given period of time.

The feature gives you “a few seconds” to undo an email after you sent it, which can be great if you forgot to include an attachment or any other important bit of information, that way you don’t look like an idiot when you have to send a second email with further information or attachments.

The undo feature isn’t available by default, as you have to go into the Gmail settings in your web browser to enable it through Gmail Labs.

With that said, here’s how to set it up and have the ability to undo sent emails in Gmail.

Undo Sent Emails in Gmail

To enable the ability to undo sent emails, just follow these simple steps:

• Go to your Gmail account in a web browser of your choice (unfortunately, you can’t do this on mobile devices).
• Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the web page and select Settings.

• Click on the Labs tab at the top.
• Scroll down and find the feature called Undo Send.
• Select Enable to the right of it and then scroll all the way down and click Save changes.

At that point, you’re all set to go and you can undo a sent email within about 30 seconds after you hit the Send button. Again, the undo feature isn’t available on mobile devices — only in the web browser.

Also be aware that when you send an email and then click to go to another area of Gmail, you won’t be able to undo a sent email after that point. You’ll only be able to undo a sent email while you’re still in that same window.

Other Gmail Labs Features

Gmail Labs is full of other cool features that you can enable in Gmail. Here are some more features that might be worth enabling.

• Canned Responses: Google calls this feature “email for the truly lazy.” Canned responses are pre-written email replies that you can save and send in common emails that you receive. For instance, if you receive a lot of emails that ask the same question, you can come up with a canned response for it to automatically send back, thus saving time on your end.

• Custom keyboard shortcuts: This lets you customize the default keyboard shortcuts in Gmail to shortcuts that you prefer.

• Google Calendar gadget: If you use Google Calendar a lot, then you might benefit from this Gmail Labs feature. It puts your upcoming events and appointments in your Gmail sidebar so that you don’t have to switch back and forth between Gmail and Google Calendar.

• Unread message icon: This features puts the number of unread emails that you have in the favicon, giving you a quick glance of how many unread emails that you have. However, this feature only works with Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

• Google Maps previews in mail: This feature shows Google Map previews of all the addresses found in an email.