Google’s Gmail adds email ‘unsend’ function

Google has added a new unsend function to its email arm, Gmail. Picture: Getty Images

Google’s Gmail service now has an option to cancel the delivery of an email within 30 seconds of hitting the send button, and will become a standard safeguard as part of a settings change made this week that is being pushed out to users globally.

Gmail users will now be able to activate the feature in Gmail’s settings. The tool delays the delivery of emails for between five and 30 seconds after the send button is pressed to give users a chance to retrieve an email mistakenly sent.

An undo button appears at the top of the screen after hitting send, and clicking it returns the email to a user’s inbox, ready to be edited once more.

The undo-send feature had been available since 2009 in Google’s experimental labs, but access was limited to those willing to sign up to the program so they could test it and other potential new features that Google created that were still under development.

Google added an “undo-send” feature in to its email management app Inbox last month, but now the feature has been released more widely to Gmail users on desktop.

Gmail now boasts more than 900 million account holders worldwide, according to statistics that Google released last month.