Undo Send feature promoted from Labs to all Gmail accounts

We've all had occasions when we've sent an email and then, for one reason or another, wished we hadn't. It may have been a message fired off in anger, or a missive you notice is littered with typos. For some time -- six years in fact -- Google has offered a bit of a safety net in the form of the Undo Send Labs feature.

For more than half a decade this was nothing more than an experimental feature, hence its appearance in Labs. But now Google has announced that it is being properly integrated into Gmail for everyone to use. There's no need to enable an experiment option any more, this is now a feature that everyone can access through Gmail's settings.

If you like the idea of giving yourself a little buffer, just head to the General section of Settings in your Gmail inbox. Scroll down until you see the Undo Send option and check the box to enable it. By default you are given a 10 second window in which you can recall an email after you hit Send but you can reduce this to 5 seconds, or increase to 30 if you prefer.

The name is slightly misleading as Undo Send does not actually enable you to pull back an email that has left your outbox. What actually happens is that when you hit Send, Gmail holds off sending the email for whatever period you have specified. This gives you a chance to rethink and hit 'undo', the email will simply not be sent.

As Google explains in a blog post introducing the feature:

'Undo Send' allows people using Gmail to cancel a sent mail if they have second thoughts immediately after sending. The feature is turned off by default for those not currently using the Labs version [...] People currently using the Labs version of 'Undo Send' will have the setting turned on by default at launch.

Is this something you think you'll make use of now it is a fully supported feature?

Photo credit: file404 / Shutterstock