Blogs

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:

1. Open the message you hope to recall.
2. In the Move group, click Actions and select Recall This Message from the dropdown.
3. 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!