Un-do that mail

Go in another’s domain

Un-do that “send” that you hit

When you wanted to spit

But you didn’t delete

Un-type that note

It made “Above the Law”

Un-do that mail.

That mail.

I’m pretty sure that was “Einstein Express,” which used time travel to actually *get* your package there the day before yesterday. If Google could only figure out a way to do THAT…

hubbub that ensued. The changes ostensibly gave Facebook rights to the content people posted on their pages, even after a user deleted their profile. Facebook claimed that the purpose of the change was to alleviate them of liability in the event that the departing user had posted their photos on another user’s wall. Essentially, Facebook did not want to be faced with the issues that would flow from the ability to “unsend” regrettable emails.

As noted, Microsoft Exchange has that feature; however, it only works within Exchange. It does not use any Internet-standard ‘recall this message’ scheme, since none exists. Even if one were designed, if it’s mail as mail it can’t work reliably; the receiving system is free to ignore the request, since there is no Internet “protocol police” to force them to comply with the recall message.

Other schemes rely on something essential to reading the message being stored on the sender’s machine. To recall a message, delete that piece. For example, the message could be sent encrypted, with a URL to retrieve the key. Of course, most people don’t have mail readers that understand encryption; beyond that, having to click on a link to retrieve a key violates the receiver’s password, since it indicates when he or she actually tried to read the message. Indeed, depending on circumstances, it can disclose geographic information the recipient may prefer to conceal.

The other variant, more compatible with virtually all mailers, stores the mail itself on some web server, and sends the URL instead, with a request that the recipient click on it. As before, there are privacy issues. Besides, many people will not click on random links arriving in email purporting to be from someone they know. In theory, one could construct an email message that did the external reference automatically. There’s a feature of HTML called an IFRAME; in essence, an IFRAME is a mini-web page embedded within some larger HTML document. But mailers typically disable autofetching of content, for precisely the privacy reasons I just outlined.

Bottom line: it cannot be done, even in principle, unless the recipient’s mail server is willing to cooperate or if the recipient is willing to sacrifice some privacy and perhaps convenience. You can work around the privacy issue by putting the other part on some trusted third party server, but that requires everyone to actually trust it.

Google does indeed add a built-in delay; it defaults to 5 seconds, but you can change that to 10 seconds.

Internet mail is store-and-forward, so you’re right; an Internet-based mail systems can’t do any better. If you have a “rock mail” system like AOL or Exchange, you can do true unsending. (Rock mail: The message itself is on a centralized server. When I send you an e-mail, I’m really just saying, “I put a message under this rock. Go look for it.”)

At the time, only a fraction of AOL mail was sent to the Internet, so store-and-forward wasn’t a big problem. For rock-mail recipients, we actually implemented it two different ways – one for Apple’s AOL-hosted eWorld and one for AOL itself.

eWorld had the ability to unsend any non-Internet mail, no matter what. This runs into exactly the awkwardness MI mentions: if I send you an e-mail, you open it, and then I unsend it, it’s still on your screen. But if you closed it without saving it – and that was rarer in the days of small hard drives and slow printers – then it was gone, and you couldn’t read it again.

AOL’s version was more limited. If any of the recipients had read the e-mail, you could no longer unsend it. In fact, we might have gone even further; it was possible for us to see if any of the recipients had listed their inbox, and thus if anyone had been aware of the e-mail’s existence at all. I forget which way we did it.

Naturally, the AOL flavor was named “ethical” unsend. If nobody finds out you did something, it must clearly be ethical.

I don’t recall any legal concerns about it, and we were fastidious about e-mail privacy (although this was before ECPA codified our responsibilities). So I’d assume that Frank’s right, and we felt that the Terms of Service allowed us to do it.

Of course, inside a corporation, different rules apply than if it were part of our normal email architecture.

Side query – would the legal reasoning apply if email had been designed from the ground up with that “feature”? What if it were simply part of the protocol from the beginning? Nobody would have been forced to be subject to it – just don’t use the protocol.

Patient: Doctor, when I get up in the morning I feel dizzy for 20 minutes.

Doctor: Get up 20 minutes later, then.