Gmail Adds 5 Second Send Rule 281
theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the
five-second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.
You don't get sober in 5 seconds! (Score:4, Funny)
I understand the rationale on this but the hold time needs to be much longer...like 12 hours for it to be effective.
Or it should be combined with the beer goggles add-on.
Either way, this won't stop my ex-girlfriend from drunk-calling me...
Re:You don't get sober in 5 seconds! (Score:5, Funny)
But you're right, this won't stop your ex-girlfriend from drunk-calling me either...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
This would still be handy, there's been plenty of occasions where I've fired off an e-mail and after the window closes I still have the after-image of the text fresh in my mind...and that's when I see the typo/missing attachment.
I even send a correction less than a minute later, but when I hit send/receive and the message goes out, I simultaneously get an e-mail back pointing out my mistake.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, I'm pretty sure that's what this feature is for -- correcting the mistakes you inevitably notice just as you hit Send. (Of course, a little discipline about doing a final proof-read would have nearly the same effect.)
In particular if you hit Reply to All when you mean Reply, this is meant to let you recover; I don't guess any amount of proof-reading would help with that.
I think TFS misses the point when it talks about "changing your mind" in that 5-second window. YMMV.
My Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
put the recipient address field below the message field
would that be helpful for anyone besides me? y/n
Re:My Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Thunderbird for one places the address book button right next to the send button (at least on my system) and I've never bothered to change it. Same thing with the dropdown box that lets you choose which address you want to send your email from, which has caused me to send at least one blank email from my personal address to a colleague.
Re: (Score:2)
KMail and gmail have missing attachment detectors.
Re:My Idea (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a terrible idea. There have been a number of times that I've sent an email with the body of text saying "here's the report you asked for" and forgot to attach it. which made me feel like an idiot.
Gnome's Evolution optionally warns you if your email contains words like "attachment" (it also seems to apply other heuristics), but no attached file exists. Works surprisingly well.
Seems like a job for Clippy! (Score:4, Funny)
You seem to be writing an inflammatory email. Should I help make sure it doesn't go to your boss?
Or
You seem to be writing a drunken email to your ex-girlfriend. Are you sure you want to do this?
Re: (Score:2)
Email clients have been doing that for many years, not just the abysmal Evo.
Yeah well, the GP's doesn't, so shoot me.
Re:My Idea (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed that for me.
Unrelated I know, but is anyone else currently experiencing problems with Gmail? I can't seem to send any mail.
Re:My Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait five seconds.
-dZ.
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For a minute I was impressed. I mean, no more "Save the bonsai kittens!" forwards!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some mail clients (well, KMail) scans the message body for words like "attached". If it finds one, and there's no attachment, it pops up a warning like "Did you mean to add an attachment?". Excellent feature, it's just a shame it's so slow to use IMAP with GMail.
Easy to avoid (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a terrible idea. There have been a number of times that I've sent an email with the body of text saying "here's the report you asked for" and forgot to attach it. which made me feel like an idiot.
You can avoid that from happening ever again. And it's very simple:
Before you write any sentence mentioning an attachment, attach the file first.
Same goes for important mail. When writing a job application, finish the email first, then add the recipient address last.
At least that would stop people who think that (Score:5, Funny)
it is cool to start a thought in the subject field, and finish it in the body field.
Good grief how I hate that. It can completely change the meaning of a post.
5 seconds isn't long enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people can barely react in that time. Although I can appreciate that a pop-up should not last longer, would a settable delay of 1-10 minutes really kill the medium? Perhaps with a "Send now" option on pending emails for urgent communication.
Re:5 seconds isn't long enough (Score:5, Funny)
Some people can barely react in that time
Yeah, but most of the people who can't react in <5 seconds are on the roadways in Florida, not behind a computer screen ;)
One Minute Rule (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if there is some technical limitation, so they set this 5 second limit.
Storing the pending mail on the client side with Javascript would explain it. The mail can be delayed for 5 seconds safely there before sending. It's not likely anything bad happens in that particular 5 seconds.
If the mail does get to the server side then it is not clear why they used only a 5 second delay which is far too short. It could be a killer feature with a delay of, say, 5 minutes.
Mail Goggles (Score:2, Interesting)
Good Idea, but (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If we use that clip where Homer says "D'oh!" a lot of times, 5 seconds is enough for approximately 12 "D'oh!"'s.
Re:Good Idea, but (Score:5, Funny)
No, but it's certainly enough time to stop the mail and add another 'FUCK YOU' to the end.
ooh baby... (Score:5, Funny)
I want you to tweak my nipples with a grapefruit spoon.
Ooh baby... (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit. When is slashdot going to implement the five second rule?
Re: (Score:2)
Sis? I'm a man, baby.
And even if I was a girl, I'd actually be a 40-year-old man.
FYI the 2 minute delays was the "slow down cowboy" period for posting a successive message.
Re: (Score:2)
FYI the 2 minute delays was the "slow down cowboy" period for posting a successive message.
For some reason "Slow down cowboy" were the exact words in my mind when I read the part of your initial message going:
I want you to tweak my nipples with a grapefruit spoon.
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FYI the 2 minute delays was the "slow down cowboy" period for posting a successive message.
And it was easily the stupidest feature of the slashcode ever incorporated. For legit users(ie non-trolls) it punished fast readers & fast typists. I utterly despised that feature. It's like a reverse dead man switch(which dead man switches are all over the place on the web).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And from some of the posters here, I think there would be unintentional as well as intentional crapfloods.
I'll gladly put up with 'slow down cowboy' in lieu of crapfloods... it avoids inflation of mod points in order to deal with them.
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I hope you realize that you are going to get a -1 troll or a +5 funny. There will be no middle ground with your comment ;)
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AFAIK, that's no longer possible.
It's been tried, but the + moderation will change the label from troll to whatever label is used for the + mod... and if (underrated) is used to mod the post up, the troll label disappears.
Last time I saw a high net positive mod (+4 or +5) with a troll label was at least 4-5 years ago.
Omega13 (Score:2)
{Galaxy Quest}
(Paraphrased)
"What's the Omega 13?"
"Opinions vary. Some think it's a doomsday device. But I think it rolls back time."
"What do you mean?"
"13 seconds is enough time to fix one costly mistake"
{/Galaxy Guest}
5 seconds is enough (Score:5, Informative)
I use Thunderbird, which has an "are you sure you want to send?" confirmation by default. Since I use the ctrl-return hot key to send, I usually just blast through this message so at one stage, I switched it off.
However, I found that in the half second between pressing ctrl-return and return to confirm, my brain was actually doing some checking to make sure I should send that message.
I sent a reply to a whole message board asking for more information about a job - not a disaster, but not what I had intended. I realised almost as soon as I had hit the button, but I'd switched off the confirmation by this point. I rapidly switched it back on. Since then, I've noticed quite a few occasions on which I've hit ctrl-return and then realised I should tweak my message in some way before I send it.
In conclusion: 5 seconds may not seem like a lot, but it could make all the difference.
Try changing habits instead (Score:5, Insightful)
Another solution is to always sit back and read through the entire message (and recipient list) before hitting send.
I mean that quite literally. Remove hands from keyboard, sit back and just read.
That habit has saved me a lot of trouble in the past.
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I suppose so. Still, like many people I send a lot of Emails. I have to weigh the time it takes me to be quite this careful against the damage that the one-bad-one-in-a-hundred does to me.
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Nothing wrong with applying a little common sense and doing it when it matters.
At the one end of the scale there's intra-project chatter. At the other end there's customer correspondence that might come back to bite you later during contracts negotiation.
Usually I find a read-through to be well worth the time though. It takes hardly any time at all for short mails, and the longer ones tend to warrant the time expenditure.
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Totally agree. I've left mail unsent overnight before. On other occasions I've had someone else read through it before sending.
Bingo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Rule number one of electronic communication: never send any while angry. Always calm down first.
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Re:5 seconds won't be enough (Score:5, Informative)
Say, you forgot to attach the required document. Or you realized you made a typo in dollar amount. Or you forgot to copy someone important on the message (and because of CYA or whatever, your boss needs to see that you cc:ed the person).
At least once a month I send an email I wish I could recall, because I would have liked to have made a small change... and instead I end up sending a followup email, which is just unwieldy and annoying.
Biology... (Score:2)
How long does it take an Adrenaline to come down on your system. Enough to stop the fight or flight instinct. That mean time should be the proper period plus some response time.
Great (Score:2)
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I could use that (Score:2)
I know more than once I've fired off an email (or made a post in say...a forum somewhere, ahem...) and twitched a second later saying NO thats NOT what I meant to do!
For example, 30 seconds ago I accidentally modded a comment here Offtopic when I intended to mod it Insightful. So here I am doing the next best thing to Undo... posting to undo my errant moderation. Guess slashdot could use some Undo too eh? Too bad there's no similar trick for email.
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If you use Outlook and Exchange, there is a message recall feature [microsoft.com]. Of course, for those who don't, we just get an annoying two line email saying "Foo would like to recall message blah". Even funnier is that in French, the word they use for recall can mean either of recall or highlight/remind.
It took me a while to understand why some senders always wanted to remind me of some silly email.
Oops... sorry, you fail. (Score:2, Informative)
A popup. How lame, lazy, and dangerous: (I realize it's an optional setting)
- First, it's NOT undo... this is a delay tactic. A real undo would have the system hold the mail in your "outbox" for a user customizable time, from where you can snatch it, but only when you need to.
- Second, you now have to wait, EVERY time you send an email. Because "email regret" happens only now and then, it's likely to get turned off. Back to square one.
- Third, if there ever was a "Send now" button, you'll get so customized
RFC (Score:2)
why not promote that Outlook-"Please dear mailserver, delete my last email"-Follow-Up (don't know how it's called there) to a real RFC?
Someone predicted this (Score:2)
I could use it (Score:5, Funny)
The other day I felt so generous that I sent an email telling someone that I would pay 2,000, 000, million billion US dollars to anyone who would help me get my dead father's money out of Nigeria.
A second later I thought "you know I could just keep the money myself", but it was too late. Keep looking, you might be the lucky one getting my email.
CNN? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really guys? You're linking to the CNN article instead of the official gmail blog's article? What, Al Jazeera didn't have an article up for this, too?
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html
May be a confirmation box is good enough (Score:2)
most of the times the ctrl-enter confirmation box of thunderbird saves me some typo or whatsoever minor mistake.
I hate you all (Score:2)
No, wait, I didn't really mean that. Yeah? I wanted to say how much I love you guys. Yeah? And how much I think you connect with me on a VI level. Yeah?
Dear
I started using that immediately (Score:2)
I am a big Google Labs user. I think they have a few really excellent little toys. Then there are others that are rubbish, but I like to focus on the good things in life :)
Anyhow, the 5 second delay is just perfect for me. I am an emotional person, I admit. I have often sent an e-mail and regretted it the next second. 5 seconds sounds about right for me to change my mind.
Another labs I use is the "notify of missing attachment". That's pure gold - basically, if I mention attachments in my e-mail, but don't p
confirmation is better (Score:2)
It would be better if it showed you the mail you can just written and asked you to confirm.
Like Slashdot comments. Perhaps a delay so people can't automatically click on confirm.
How I prevent 'email accidents' (Score:2, Informative)
Whenever I replies to/writes a sensitive or important email, I clear the To/Cc fields, completely, and only add the addresses just before I'm sending. ... This, of course, should be after I've proofread it several times, and preferable waited a day :-)
Works in all email clients!
Outlook already has this ... (Score:2)
I always thought it was just because Outlook was slow, someone should have told me it was a feature.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
I used to work for a company where The Managing Director frequently used to send (usually offensive) emails to the wrong people by accident. His usual error was to insult someone behind their back and accidentally include them in the cc field!
Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!
At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!
At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!
It occurs to me that if you laid the Ethernet cable for the mail server across those stairs you could allow him to accomplish his goal of preventing the mail from going out while providing endless amounts of humor for the rest of the office ;)
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Interesting)
That reminds me of a company I used to work for. A woman there, usually very kind and agreeable, was fed up with one of her contacts feeding her a lot of excuses why he wasn't able to make a deadline for the 3rd time. She thought she forwarded a nice e-mail to her manager containing some very choice words expressing her opinion that matter.
Oh how quickly that send button was smashed without carefully verifying who was in the To field, only to discover that instead of forward she had pressed reply to all. When the deed was done and the mailserver had delivered her incredibly inflammatory experiment in vocabulary she stood at my desk nearly in tears asking me if I could stop her mail from reaching its destination.
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
Surprisingly though, that person never missed a deadline again.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
The option to retract messages as implemented in Outlook isn't a bad idea, really, but I still hate it for the false impression it creates. I've seen it happen enough that some user becomes familiar with the feature and then comes under the impression that it actually allows them to rescind email messages at will, regardless of the circumstances. I've even had a couple users get angry with me-- as though I had the email server configured incorrectly-- because, after having sent the message over the Intern
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I used to work for a company where The Managing Director frequently used to send (usually offensive) emails to the wrong people by accident. His usual error was to insult someone behind their back and accidentally include them in the cc field!
Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out!
At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency!
So, what part of Dilbert's company did you work in? How incompetent was this managing director?
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
It happens more often than you think. I've had plenty of times when I've clicked send and almost instantaneously realized I had a mistake in the email. This will save me from having to immediately reply to my own email to make that correction, thus looking like a fool (I have plenty of other ways to make myself look like a fool, thank you very much).
Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
You mean Mail Goggles [blogspot.com]?
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?"
Yes, you did. Now cut it out before I get a restraining order ;)
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Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.
I thought Slashdot already had an article on this feature. It's called Mail Goggles [blogspot.com]. It won't stop you from sending the email, but it may slow you down.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
I thought Slashdot already had an article on this feature. It's called Mail Goggles [blogspot.com]. It won't stop you from sending the email, but it may slow you down.
Unfortunately, I have a Masters Degree in Drunken Calculus, so that feature won't help me :(
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Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, I have a Masters Degree in Drunken Calculus, so that feature won't help me :(
Yes. As long as you know not to mix drinking and deriving.
<ducks>
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
We're going in so many tangents we may as well be a derivative.
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Re:That makes no sense (Score:4, Funny)
My old mail server was setup to queue mail from 9 PM to 8 AM. This was to prevent me from emailing after drinking at the bar.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
How many times did you come running into work in your boxers with a major hangover at 7:59am screaming UNPLUG THE MAIL SERVER! UNPLUG THE MAIL SERVER!?
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It sounds like you need to drink more than you need an improved email system
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Measure twice, cut once. Seriously now, don't send stuff out you're not prepared to send! Maybe instead of a 5 second send rule they should just add an annoying "Are you SURE you want to send this message?" verification box. 5 seconds isn't enough to doublecheck a message... they should maybe let you queue it up for 5 minutes which would be more useful.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:4, Interesting)
We use Outlook/Exchange. It had a message recall button, but the function wasn't enabled. Which meant about once a week you could see a message with a followup THAT ASKED THE READER if the previous message could be recalled. Even if you said yes (after reading the mistaken message of course) the bad message did not disappear.
This worked great a flag for screwed up mail to be read first. Thanks Microsoft!
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Now, if they could just add a feature that held any emails sent after 2am for 12 hours, aka the "sober up first" rule, thus preventing me from waking up after a bender thinking, "oh crap, did I really send that email confessing my true feelings to that girl I had a crush on in high school but hadn't talked to in 15 years?", life would be just great.
Just don't turn the PC on when you get home at 3am. Once I worked that one out, I had much better mornings after -- mostly because I'd not spent an hour (or more) messing about on the web after returning home late, and was asleep by 3.15 rather than 4.45.
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What do you mean, turn on? I stopped turning off my home computers around the time CD-ROM drives became popular.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I primarily use Thunderbird for work email. There is an option to confirm before sending (much in the manner of Vista's UAC "Are you sure?" windows) that most people disable. I leave it enabled and find myself saying "no, I'm not sure" at least once per week.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This sounds inherently stupid. How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
A lot. I've had this happen. It happens no /. to.
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
A lot. I've had this happen. It happens no /. to.
Like the times when one typos a two letter word.
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A lot. I've had this happen. It happens no /. to.
Like the times when one typos a two letter word.
It took 13 minutes to notice that? The speeling Nazis are getting slower and slower these days...
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds inherently stupid. How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
You have fallen victim to marketing hype.
What this "feature" does is place your sendmail into a pending outbound que, which has limited size. Thus, its primary effect is to restrict your ability to spam/flood email out of the gmail servers.
The 'undo send' option is just for show.
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Re:That makes no sense (Score:4, Funny)
Outbound qué?
-dZ.
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
Sometimes when I want to type an "A" I end up hitting TAB (french keyboard). If I'm at the end of a word, and I'm not paying attention to what's on screen, I'll hit space while the focus is on the "Send" button, and the email will be sent.
You don't have a small child. (Score:2)
You must not have a small child. I get a lot of /sending before the sentence is done/ problems due to my daughter hitting the send button for me.
Having small children requires a lot of quick responses to unexpected events. Yesterday, while I innocently sat coding, my daughter gave me a gooey handful of cat poop she found somewhere. After a quick exercise in emergency bathing my wife and I cleaned/searched the house and were unable to figure out where she managed to find this special gift at. The joys of par
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That makes no sense (Score:5, Funny)
There is no such condition as "decision anxiety".
You must choose either Cognitive dissonance [wikipedia.org] OR Multipotentiality [wikipedia.org]
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And for some reason Labs isn't even an option on my screen. It's one of those weird things that shows up sometimes and doesn't most of the time.
They should just enable it by default. Even better they (and all other mail servers on the planet) should enforce a 5 second rule to slow down spammers. Maybe even 30 seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
EOL user? God, I wish end-of-life was the status of AOL users back then... the internet would be a much happoer place by now.
For GUI stories, please (Score:2)
refer to the Apple section, you can find it on the left.