Providing you’re using Outlook with your Northwestern Exchange email account, you might be able to retract your email. But you need to be quick and you need to hope some factors are on your side. We’ll explore how to recall an email, the requirements that need to be met, along with some alternative approaches.
How to Recall a Message in Outlook
- Navigate to your Sent Items folder and then open the message that you want to recall.
- From the ribbon, ensure that the Message tab is selected.
- In the Move group, click Actions (which may have collapsed into an icon, depending on your window size).
- From the drop-down that appears, select recall this message.
- Choose delete unread copies of this message to remove the email from the recipient’s inbox entirely.
- Alternatively, you can Delete unread copies and replace with a new message if you want to send a different email in place of the original.
- For confirmation of the recall status, check the checkbox Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient.
Caveats
- Recalling won’t work on emails you’ve sent outside an organization to, for example, Gmail.
- The recall request must be submitted and processed before the recipient has opened the original message, else the recall will fail.
- If the recipient has a rule that moves your email from the inbox to another folder, the recall request will fail.
- Finally, recall requests can’t be processed if the recipient is viewing their emails outside the Outlook desktop program, like through the Outlook web app or their mobile device.
As you’ve seen, it’s a simple procedure to retract an email in Outlook. However, whether or not the recall will be successful is an entirely different matter because it depends on so many factors. In a world where people can access their emails from anywhere at any time, you shouldn’t rely on recall.
Keywords: email email
Created: 2018-08-22 20:16:29
Updated: 2019-02-04 16:59:04