How To Recall An Email In Outlook

We’ve all accidentally sent out incomplete emails, emails addressed to the wrong person, or emails that we probably should have re-read and double checked. Thankfully the ability to recall or unsend emails is a feature that we’re starting to see integrated into more email platforms these days.

If you’re an Outlook user and want to know how to recall or even replace an email that you sent out, here are the steps that you will need to take:

1. Launch the Outlook program and on the panel to the left of the window, select your “Sent Items” folder
2. You will have to double-click the message that you want to recall. Clicking it once to see the preview will not work in this instance.
3. From the “Message” tab at the top, go to Actions > Recall This Message
4. You will be presented with a couple of options: Delete unread copies of this message and Delete unread copies and replace with a new message. The former will basically recall the message and it will be as if you did not send the email at all. The latter will recall the email and replace it with a new message, so the person receiving it won’t even know that there was a previous message.

While the steps are pretty simple and straightforward, we should warn you that unlike other recall/unsend features like those found in Gmail, Outlook’s recall has a few caveats that you will need to be aware of in the event that you are unable to recall an email.

1. You and the person you’re sending the email to will need to have an Exchange account within the same organization. This means that if you were to send it to a family member or a friend that uses a different email service, then this won’t work.
2. Messages protected by Azure Information Protection cannot be recalled either.
3. If the email has already been opened or move from the Inbox, such as through automatic sorting filters, the recall feature won’t work.

 

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Microsoft, outlook