The incredibly informative and useful exchange below happened between me and coworker today, and thought "if I didn't know about this, surely there are others" so I am sharing it here. I have tested un-sending emails to my accounts on other domains and it doesn't seem to work. In fact, it's worse because not only does the email not get un-sent, but the recipient gets a second email notifying them that you tried to un-send it. But if you use Outlook and want to un-send emails to people on the same domain, hopefully this works for you.

Here's what I sent her, it explains how this learning moment was born:

Her reply:

 

I'm not sure I would be a supporter of that feature. Why would I want somebody reaching into my email archive to destroy a message I have received. OTOH, if I have already deleted the email there is no practical effect of unsending it. I'm sure the lawyers would hate that feature as well.

Just think, people (e.g. candidates) could deny they said all kinds of things once upon a time. T'would be hard to hold them to account, and we can't have that now.

 

I'm not sure I would be a supporter of that feature. Why would I want somebody reaching into my email archive to destroy a message I have received. OTOH, if I have already deleted the email there is no practical effect of unsending it. I'm sure the lawyers would hate that feature as well.

Just think, people (e.g. candidates) could deny they said all kinds of things once upon a time. T'would be hard to hold them to account, and we can't have that now.

I did a little bit of investigation into it and learned that the feature has existed in Ms. Outlook for the past 20 years but wasn't popular because it didn't work very well. For example it would only work if the person you sent the email to just used the same Outlook desktop client as you, and of course same domain, and if they had rules applied that automatically moved your email to a new folder then they would see it, and often it didn't work "just because." But as of last year they made a big improvement to it and without that, I still would have seen the email on my phone. Before last year the recall function was a feature of the client itself, Outlook for PC. Now it lives on the exchange server so it can un-send to any client (in the same domain). But either way, before 2023 or after, the email still exists on the server and if there are any legal/criminal events requiring un-recall (un-un-send?) of recalled emails it can be done easily by an admin.

 

It's not so much a feature of e-mail, as it is a feature of an organization's e-mail platform, such as Outlook. That network administrator can choose to use a platform that supports the ability to unsend things and then enable that feature. When you unsend and e-mail, it is the simply the mail server for that organization manipulating its database.

Personally, I do not like the feature, though I can see some very legitimate uses for it. If you accidently send privileged information, either information that shouldn't have been sent to anyone, or information that was sent to people that shouldn't have gotten it, you can unsend it and mitigate the breach. It's never guaranteed that the breach has been solved, since the recipients could always have copied the contents someplace else or might have their e-mail set up to automatically forward e-mails to other accounts.

The main reason I don't like it is that it fosters complacency. People need to realize and assume that the moment they hit Send, that what they typed is now, at least potentially, out in the wild forevermore. The best policy is to never type anything into an e-mail -- even one that you are just typing to vent and have no intention of actually sending -- unless you are prepared for what you type to end up on the front page of the New York Times.

 

I'm not sure I would be a supporter of that feature. Why would I want somebody reaching into my email archive to destroy a message I have received. OTOH, if I have already deleted the email there is no practical effect of unsending it. I'm sure the lawyers would hate that feature as well.

Just think, people (e.g. candidates) could deny they said all kinds of things once upon a time. T'would be hard to hold them to account, and we can't have that now.

It has virtually no effect in that regard. It is trivially easy to forge e-mails in such a way that it is very difficult to prove that they aren't legitimate, so people that want to disavow something that is legitimate can simply assert that it is a fake and it's hard to prove that it's not.

 

The incredibly informative and useful exchange below happened between me and coworker today, and thought "if I didn't know about this, surely there are others" so I am sharing it here. I have tested un-sending emails to my accounts on other domains and it doesn't seem to work. In fact, it's worse because not only does the email not get un-sent, but the recipient gets a second email notifying them that you tried to un-send it. But if you use Outlook and want to un-send emails to people on the same domain, hopefully this works for you.

Here's what I sent her, it explains how this learning moment was born:


Her reply:

Sorry, @strantor, you do not have permission to remove any files from my mail server, regardless of how they got there or what service you use.

 

It has virtually no effect in that regard. It is trivially easy to forge e-mails in such a way that it is very difficult to prove that they aren't legitimate, so people that want to disavow something that is legitimate can simply assert that it is a fake and it's hard to prove that it's not.

It is true that I never had to prove anything in court. When I got divorced, they just took my word for everything.

 

It is true that I never had to prove anything in court. When I got divorced, they just took my word for everything.

What does that have to do with anything?

 

Sorry, @strantor, you do not have permission to remove any files from my mail server, regardless of how they got there or what service you use.

Don't worry I apparently wouldn't even know how to if I did have your permission. I would need some overachieving secretary to teach me.

 

What does that have to do with anything?

Proving things in court with emails

 

Don't worry I apparently wouldn't even know how to if I did have your permission. I would need some overachieving secretary to teach me.

I had a point:

When you use 3rd party servers, your data is no longer under your control. That Outlook seems to allow you to pull back emails means that MS (and their partners!) has control over your -- and your recipient's -- data.

This is unacceptable to me.

I don't trust my mom with my data. Why would I trust Microsoft?

 

Proving things in court with emails

How does your stating that some court took your word about some unspecified "everything" during your divorce have anything to do with whether, in general, the ability to unsend e-mails has any effect on a recipient's ability to claim that a sender did send it, or the sender's ability to claim that they did not?

 

I had a point:

When you use 3rd party servers, your data is no longer under your control. That Outlook seems to allow you to pull back emails means that MS (and their partners!) has control over your -- and your recipient's -- data.

This is unacceptable to me.

I don't trust my mom with my data. Why would I trust Microsoft?

Ok, I got that there was a point, and my reply was just in jest. But now that you've clarified I realize that I only got half of it.

I thought your point was that the email recall feature only works if the sender and recipient are on the same organization's exchange server, and since you have your own email server, I wouldn't be able to recall an email I send to you. Which I am pretty sure is correct.

But now you seem to be implying that I could recall an email I sent to you, if you were using a 3rd party server, because Microsoft. (But you don't so I can't). I am hardly the expert, having confessed to just learning of this thing today, but I don't think that's how it works. Emails sent from my employer's domain to my accounts hosted by yahoo, Google, and godaddy, were not recallable. But maybe for example if I sent an email from my godaddy account to another user of godaddy email hosting? I don't know, you might be right?

 

Emails sent from my employer's domain to my accounts hosted by yahoo, Google, and godaddy, were not recallable.

Irrelevant.

Any control your employer believes it has over its email (and whatever other cloud services it use) is purely imaginary.