Behind Every Great Company and Feature…

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…There is a great press agent.

AOL email has had an “unsend” button for more than a dozen years. This is so funny. Google announces this feature and it makes news on CBS. AOL has it for a dozen years and it is considered an old and outdated email client. :-)

Go figure. How many PhDs did it take to copy this old AOL mail feature 12 years later?

0 thoughts on “Behind Every Great Company and Feature…”

  1. April fools joke? Nope. This year its CADIE and GMail Autopilot feature which I would gladly use if it existed.

  2. That was one of the best features in AOL email. And Google only gives you 5 seconds to do it – hardly enough time to second guess or proof the sent mail.

  3. One of the advantages of the ‘walled garden’ system was greater control of all aspects of the system. Creating this for a distributed system is a much different deal, as we all know, but Ted is right that it shouldn’t take 12 years to create a protocol for rescinding a message.

  4. Wait, you only have FIVE SECONDS to hit unsend? And Google thinks that’s enough time to realize you made a mistake? Seriously? If they implemented it like AOL, where you can do it at any time for an email account using gmail, and then add the 5 second rule for outside domain addresses then that would be better.

  5. To be fair, the AOL undelete only works if the addressee is also using AOL (and hasn’t already read the message).

  6. Actually, Ted, one of the great grandfathers of electronic mail, MCI Mail, developed and deployed this feature in the mid-1980s after an employee accidentally send some sensitive info to a customer. There were two sibling features. One was the ‘unsend’ command that some of us referred to as the ‘Aw (poop)’ button. The other would delete the content of a message if the recipient had already read it. (Most of us were using terminals to access mail in those days; no local storage of messages ’cause nobody had a machine with a hard disk.)