When you hit the “Send” button on email, your thoughts have just sailed into the world. If you have something like Google “undo” installed, there is a short period of time when you can change your mind. But after that, it’s all over.
This is usually fine, but every once in a while we all find that we’ve sent out a badly worded email, or one which accidentally contains factual errors, or sometimes, (sigh) an email that we shouldn’t have sent at all.
It seems to me that the last moment to change our minds should not be moments after we’ve hit the “Send” button, but rather moments before the intended recipient has read our missive.
Yes, it’s true that shortly after we hit “Send” the underlying sendmail protocol has already delivered our first email, and soon our original message has been copied into a spoolfile somewhere in the recipient’s file system. But so what? Modern mail programs contain layers of functionality over this raw base level. Surely they could deal with an “edit earlier email” meta-email.
So why don’t email programs allow us to continue editing, up until the moment the message is actually open and read?
In this day of email on your smartphone, I wonder whether you’d really get much of a window to recall an email before the recipient saw that it existed (even it they hadn’t read it all yet). Maybe you need a settable delay on the sending side. And then, there are just some problems that humans have that technology cannot solve (like saying things you wish you hadn’t and needing to clean it up).
It would be interesting to know what the mean delay time is between knowing an email has arrived on your smartphone, and actually reading it. That would be the operational window for such post-facto editing.
And yes, I agree, artificial intelligence, no matter how advanced, will always be trumped by real stupidity. 😉
Ha! There you go. You just blame the unfortunate email on a virus that uses advanced Artificial Stupidity technology to embarrass the owner of the computer it attacks by sending apparently ill-considered but well-targeted emails.
Sharon, that’s brilliant!
Although it may also be true that artificial stupidity, no matter how advanced, will always be trumped by real intelligence. 🙂
Ooh, I shoulda seen that one coming! Well done 🙂
I think the problem is the privacy. Once mailman delivered your mail to somebody’s mail box, it is not yours anymore, you can’t break in and re write it. You also can’t put spy to check when person will open a mail box. Will he open it or drop into trush it his right and I do not think there is anything can be done.
The reason we don’t have this is very simple: If you could opt to see an email that had been sent and then retracted, would you? I know I would. I know that seeing a retraction request is the surest way to get me to read an email, because there could be something amusing, or secret, or unguarded in there. Did they say something snide in a Reply To All? Did they send it to the wrong Phil?
I’m afraid your remorse at sending is already well matched by my eagerness to glimpse beneath the veil of the everyday filtering and communication management that goes on, to see a moment of truth. And a retraction request, by being an admission of a mistake, is almost always a moment of truth.
Everyone wants to have this system when they’ve hit Send, and no-one would want to have the system take away their chance.
Point well taken Phil, but it’s not so much retractions I’m thinking about as editing. You wouldn’t know that I had continued editing my email to you after it was already “in the cloud”, unless you had already read it before my edit.