Hi, I was just wondering if there was a possibility to cancel a sent item
(i.e. mail), as you can with an invitation to a meeting. I believe it was
possible with an older release. Any ideas?
Many thanks,
dentsdelyon

you can recall messages but it doesn't work reliably and when it does, it
only works with Exchange server accounts.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
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"dentsdelyon" wrote in message
...
Hi, I was just wondering if there was a possibility to cancel a sent item
(i.e. mail), as you can with an invitation to a meeting. I believe it was
possible with an older release. Any ideas?
Many thanks,
dentsdelyon

dentsdelyon wrote:

Hi, I was just wondering if there was a possibility to cancel a sent
item (i.e. mail), as you can with an invitation to a meeting. I
believe it was possible with an older release. Any ideas?

You can recall a message only under fairly strict conditions, the first
being that both you and your recipient must use Exchange, the second being
that the recipient cannot have read the message yet. Even if both are true,
message recall doesn't seem reliable.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

"dentsdelyon" wrote in message
...
Hi, I was just wondering if there was a possibility to cancel a sent
item
(i.e. mail), as you can with an invitation to a meeting. I believe
it was
possible with an older release. Any ideas?


Send another e-mail apologizing for the first one unless you expect
that would infuriate the recipient even more.

Recall requires both sender and recipient be using Microsoft's
Exchange server, that both are within the same Exchange organization
(i.e., not using Exchange in separate companies), and both must use
Outlook (to recognize the special header with the directive to do the
message delete). The recall relies on the recipient reading their
e-mails in top-down order sorted by received time so they open your
request to recall before reading your first e-mail. Recalls end up
sending another *new* e-mail trying to get Outlook to delete a
previously received e-mail. The recall *request* must be read before
the original e-mail so it can ask Outlook to delete that original
e-mail. If the recipient sorts the header list in ascending timestamp
order, your original e-mail is listed before your recall request so
the user is highly likely to open the original e-mail first.
Regardless of sort order, the user could still open your original
e-mail before opening your recall request.

Under ideal conditions, it will work. It's pretty hard to get those
ideal conditions. Figure you're pretty much screwed if the original
e-mail had information that you did not want the recipient to see.
Some users configure an outbound mail rule to automatically delay
sending their e-mails to get around their lack of impulse control
(i.e., create a rule when sending e-mails to "defer delivery by N
minutes"). This works when using Exchange. If using SMTP then you
need to leave Outlook open; else, if the N minutes is longer than how
long before you exit Outlook then the e-mail doesn't get sent until
you next load Outlook (because obviously your client needs to be
running to do the delivery).