Don’t Depend on Recall
If you send a message you want to withdraw, you can try Recall, but don’t hold your breath. It seldom works. If you want to try, here’s how:
- Open the message you hope to recall.
- In the Move group, click Actions and select Recall This Message from the dropdown.
- In the resulting dialog (Figure D), choose one of the delete options and click OK.
Now, this feature is great in theory, but the reality is, it will probably fail because:
- The message must be unread.
- You and the recipient must be in the same Exchange organization.
- The recipient must be using Outlook.
- The message must be sitting in the recipient’s Inbox—if a rule moved it to another folder, you can’t recall it.
In addition, you can’t recall a message sent to a specific recipient if you sent the email to several people. You must recall it from all or none. One last warning: If the recipient has read the message but not marked it as read, Outlook will send you a positive recall report—you won’t know the recipient read the message!
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