Retrieve emails in Gmail

Emails sent in error have become a problem for many offices. Clicking “reply all” and sending a reply to the latest manager’s letter of recommendation to the entire team, including the manager, can quickly cause problems. In the middle of an office workday, messages may be sent to the wrong recipient.

To ensure that confidential content or insensitive comments do not generate apologies or cause service problems, Gmail offers the ability to accept sent emails. Here we explain exactly how to retrieve an email sent by Gmail and under what conditions to stop sending messages that have already been sent.

Under what conditions is it possible to retrieve emails?

In fact, it is possible to recover emails sent through Gmail, regardless of whether the recipient of the message is a Gmail user or any other email program. The only thing that prevents you from recovering emails sent to Gmail is time. After sending an email, Google will give you a certain amount of time to receive the message. This is the time to delete: even if you click send, Gmail stores the email temporarily. At this point, you can send it back, stop sending it. The default timeout for Gmail is five seconds. Clearly, this five second is a short time. You often realize that you forgot to attach a document to an email after a while, for example. Unfortunately, the blocking period can be extended. To do this, you just need to follow these steps:

1. Open the “Options” menu on the Gmail cogwheel icon.
2. Open the settings by clicking on “Settings”.
3. In the “Unsend” section, select the time (“Unsend period”) of your choice.

Retrieve an email sent with Gmail in the web version

Suppose you increased the pause time to 30 seconds. You are in the office, writing a letter as usual, and after clicking “Send” you realize that you forgot to attach a file. Instead of getting caught in a series of emails apologizing for mistakes, with Gmail you can easily restore messages. To do this, follow these steps:

1. You have sent the message by clicking on “Send”.
2. The message remains for a period within the cancellation period. Click on the “Undo” option.
3. The message is recovered. Gmail automatically informs you and the message is reopened.

Recovering emails with Gmail: iPhone guide

If you have an iPhone, you can download the Gmail app and use it without any problems. The app looks the same on your iPhone as it does on an Android device and has the same options and features for both systems. Therefore, to retrieve a sent email, you just need to follow the steps mentioned above. After clicking “Send”, an automatic notification will appear where you can click “Cancel”. At this point, the Gmail application will receive the sent message.

Recovering messages with Gmail: Android guide

As expected, you can receive emails sent via Gmail if you are using an Android device. If you created a message in the Gmail app and clicked send, you can edit it as follows:

1. Click the “Undo” option.
2. Gmail recovers the message automatically.