My default mail application has been outlook for quite some time now. Have you sent an email accidentally and don’t know how to recall an email in Outlook? You dont want to be in a situtation where you sent a wrong or embarassing email to the wrong person. So how to recall and email in outlook before they read this email ? Is it possible in office 365 and office 2019?
While it may seem to be a simple and easy task, recalling an email is not always as simple as it appears. Message recall allows you to recover a message you sent from the inboxes of recipients who haven’t yet opened it. It’s ideal in case you’ve misspelled someone’s name or forgotten to include an attachment. You can actually cancel an email before it’s sent out in Gmail, but it’s different in Outlook.
It isn’t the most user-friendly, unfortunately. Both the email sender and the receiver must be Outlook email client users on an Exchange server in order to remember an email in Outlook, among other requirements. As a result, if you don’t both use Outlook, the functionality won’t work.
The possibility to recall an email in Outlook is very limited. The condition always doesn’t on your side, and sometimes you may not be lucky enough to recall your email. If you want to learn how to recall an email in Outlook, then read the complete steps mentioned below in this article.
How To Recall An Email in Outlook?
If you are using the modern version of Outlook or Outlook 365, you can recall your email in Outlook by using the following methods.
Quick Tip: Try putting your outlook to work offline to save you some trouble while the email is still in your outbox.
Step 1: After sending your email to the receiver, if you want to recall or edit that mail, then first go to the sent mail option from the left side email menu.
Step 2: In the sent mail option, you can see all the messages you sent. Press double-click on the message that you want to recall. You can only recall the message if the receiver hasn’t opened the message.
Step 3: After the double-click, a new Window tab will pop out. In the top section of that tab, you can see the ‘Move’ section.
Step 4: Just beside the ‘Move’ folder icon, you will see two smaller icons. When you hover over the bottom icon, you see that this icon name is ‘More Move Actions.’ Click that icon and then select the ‘Recall This Message’ option.
Step 5: Then, you see two options in a pop-up box. You can either choose the first option or the second one. After selecting, click on the ‘Ok’ button, and then your message will be unsend.
If you want to edit the same email and then resend it to the same user, you can also do it here. For that, click on the ‘More Move Action’ option, and then in the menu, you will see the ‘Resend This Message’ option. Click on that option and then edit your message. After that, enter the send button, and then your message will be delivered to its destination.
Why Recalling in Outlook Always Doesn’t Work?
Outlook has included a recall function in their system so that the sender can recall the wrong message just after sending it to the receiver.
In some cases, this does not work. Whenever you try to recall an email in Outlook, you get a notification email of the outcome. In some cases, you do not receive that either. I’ve tried to sum up the most common issues while trying to unsend an email in outlook. If you are facing any other issues, please let me know in the comments section below and the article will be updated with the possible solution for your issue.
1. Receiver opens the email before you recall it
Recalling only works when the receiver hasn’t opened your message. If you can immediately decide to recall your email within a few seconds of sending your message, you will be able to recall your message.
When you use the Outlook recall option, there are two possible things that will display on the receiver’s side. If the receiver first opens the recall message, the original message is destroyed, and the recipient is notified that you, the sender, have removed the message from their mailbox.
In case the receiver opens the original message first, then you won’t be able to recall your message. If you try to recall the message opened by the receiver, the receiver will be notified that you wanted to recall that email.
The receiver receives a message stating that a recall attempt failed if the recall message and the original mail are in different folders. This happens regardless of the message’s read status or Outlook settings.
2. Why is email recall not working on outlook office 365?
While there are multiple reasons why email recall might not work for a Office 365 user. The email recall option will only work in the following case.
Every time you send an email using Office 365 and the email is straightaway sent to the azure and then directly to the receiver’s inbox. There are no pitstops or any other locations on the server that the email is being routed to. If there is one, then the recall function will trigger the recall function but the email will not return as the route taken by the email to reach the sender is not completely understood by Outlook.
In this case, the user recalling the email might not even receive an email notification of the outcome of the unsend request.
For eg – If your company uses a policy that automatically assigns a signature to all the emails automatically, the unsend feature will not work and you probably will not receive any email notification.
Conclusion
In this way, you can recall or modify your send email and again resend it to the receiver. In Outlook there are many features that you can explore. Among them, one is to set and increase the message delivery time, just like in Gmail, so that you can simply recall your email just by clicking on the Undo button, which will appear at the bottom after sending mail. If you want to learn more about the feature of Outlook, then let us know in the comment section.
