What does Gmail’s Undo View message mean?

Q I’ve used Google’s Gmail webmail service for a fair while now and like it a lot. Every time I send an email I notice the following message, in yellow, at the top - ‘Your message has been sent. Undo View message’. The wording of this is a bit confusing. I’ve not viewed a sent message and even if I had, what would be the purpose of ‘undoing’, having viewed it? It’s not as though I’d forget what I’d seen. Admittedly this isn’t really a problem as such, and the message does disappear after a short while, but I do find it a bit annoying. What does it mean and can I stop it appearing?

Bobby Farrow

A Until you mentioned it, we’d not noticed how potentially confusing this Gmail message is. However, next time you send an email look closely at the message and you’ll notice that the ‘Undo’ and ‘View message’ parts are two distinct links. Click the first and Gmail will abort the sending of the email before it leaves the Gmail outbox, while clicking the second does what you might expect.

It can be a useful feature for recovering from the heat-of-the-moment replies but if you wish to disable it, it’s easily done. First, log in to Gmail in the usual way, then click the cog icon at the top right and choose Mail settings. Now click the General link and scroll down to find the Undo Send heading. To disable the feature, click to remove the tick from the ‘Enable undo send’ box, or tweak the amount of time it’s displayed by choosing a new timeout from the dropdown list to the right.