Send of a Mail - Undo or Later

today announced a new feature in Labs called 'Undo Send', which allows the user to revoke/undo the mail just sent. Hold on! its not a anytime revoke, it has pre-determined time limit of 5 secs. Once you hit the "Send" button, you will have 5 secs before you hit "Undo" to avoid sending the mail.

This is a very nice feature at times, when you quickly hit the "Send" and then realized that you missed to attach a file, or forgot to add your signature, or forgot to add couple more email Ids, etc.. But the question lies in how best the usecase is and how best the solution here is.

I think everyone agrees to the fact that there should be a option to undo a sent mail for all possible reasons. So, lets see the options available. The service from GMail is already explained, so lets now see the options from other mail services.

1. (Zoho Mail): Zoho is one of the good mail services. I am unable to rate this with GMail, but at times GMail wins. Zoho Mail service offered lot of features which GMail offered very late. Classic example is the Offline Mail from GMail using Google Gears. Zoho had this service a long back. Now coming back to the feature being discussed here. Zoho has a service called "Outbox". One can enable this in the "Settings" and provide a customized time limit (specified in minutes only) as to when the mail has to be sent from the "Outbox". So, when you hit "Send" the mail will sit in the "Outbox" till its time comes.



2. (In Mail): "In" the service of Network18 is pretty new email service. It has a similar feature called "Future Mail". Once you compose the mail instead of hitting the "Send" button, there is a new button called "Send as Future Mail". Click on that and it will show you a scheduler, and choose the date, month, year and time as to when the mail has to be sent.
Now, you may ask; this is a different feature altogether, because here user is forced to select the time for each mail, which is not the case with Zoho Mail or GMail. Yes, but the service is similar and allows the user to schedule the send time which is very useful to send greetings, send when the Internet is free during nights, etc.. and by the time the mail goes, you have the time to edit it and do all the modifications required.