Don’t Depend on Recalling Messages

“Recall” is one of those features that I’m really inclined to say that you should never use. But “never” is an awfully tough rule to live with and people tend to resist when you tell them they should “never” do anything. So rather than have you throw on your old black leather jacket and start recalling messages just to prove that you’re an email rebel, I’ll suggest that you avoid using recall as much as you possibly can. I’m sure that your email administrator would tell you that it’s a feature that you shouldn’t use—she’d probably turn it off altogether if it were up to her—because of the havoc it can wreak on your mail server. Trying to recall a message from a large number of recipients can slow, or even crash, an entire email system. While it’s amazingly easy to accidentally forward an inappropriate joke to everyone in your office (all you have to do is pick the wrong distribution list), it’s much more difficult for your email system to go back once the message has been sent, search through all of the mailboxes and messages they contain and retrieve all of the copies of the one you wish you had never sent.

I’d tell you not to use “recall” for another reason. It usually doesn’t work. What do you do first when you receive one of those messages saying “so-and-so would like to recall the message: My boss is a big fat jerk”? You think to yourself, “well this must be something interesting” and you open and read it, don’t you? That’s what everyone does. Attempting to retrieve a message usually just draws attention to it, which causes your recipients to open it and makes the email impossible to recall any longer. Even if your correspondents aren’t sitting at their desks waiting to thwart your recall attempts, chances are you still won’t be successful. If you’re sending to someone outside of your own email system the other one may not be compatible with recall or may have the feature turned off. Even more of a concern these days is the preponderance of BlackBerrys and other mobile devices in the workplace. Once a message has been received on one of these they can’t be recalled—though attempting to do so will generate one of those attention-grabbing emails pointing out that you’ve attempted to recall the message. Good luck with that.