Can I retract an e-mail I send?

Can I retract an e-mail I send?

Tim Burress (E-mail Etiquette and Organization Specialist) gives expert video advice on: What are the consequences of inappropriate e-mail?; Can I retract an e-mail I send? and more...

You can recall an e-mail once its been sent, if you are in the United States, and you send an e-mail to Japan and it's going through about 20 different servers and you had a reaction speed of about two seconds, you can recall the message. Otherwise, once you hit send because of the technology today with speed of internet, it is gone, and some of us get mislead by a function key that we see in Outlook or Lotus Notes called the 'recall' button and we try to recall that message, and basically it doesn't work because we don't have the speed in order to recall that message fast enough. And so, you send a message that you shouldn't have sent, that arrives at the recipients mailbox, and then another message comes in trying to recall it, so you're basically giving evidence to the fact that you shouldn't have sent the message by trying to recall the message. It doesn't really work. The better thing to do is just not send the message in the first place.