Undo send now in Outlook for Mac

Office-Watch.comLast updated: 29 June 2022

Microsoft 365,Microsoft Office for Mac,Microsoft Outlook,Office 365

Undo Send, a feature in Outlook for Windows for as long as we can remember, has finally made it to Outlook 365 for Mac in a unnecessarily limited way.

For as long as people have had email, they’ve wanted a way to take back a message they’ve sent. There are two types of going back on a sent email. There’s Recall Message which attempts to delete a sent email, an option that might work but often doesn’t.

Undo Send is different. When you click ‘Send’ an email is usually sent immediately but with ‘Undo Send’ the message put on hold for a little time before sending. During that delay, you can choose to stop the message going out.

The Send delay isn’t long, sometimes just 5 or 10 seconds. Enough for a ‘second thought’ but not much more.

Outlook for Windows has had this feature for a long time, done via a Rule applied to outgoing messages. See Delay sending a message the easy way in Outlook

Outlook.com and Gmail in a browser also have a similar ‘delayed send’ options.

Now, at long last, Undo Send is available in Outlook 365 for Mac though it’s implemented differently than in Outlook for Windows and doesn’t work for all mailboxes.

Unnecessary limitation

Undo Send in Outlook 365 for Mac only works for Microsoft 365 mailboxes and Outlook.com! There’s no good technical reason for that, aside from Microsoft’s bloody-minded obsession with pushing customers to their cloud services.

Delayed/undo send in Outlook for Windows works on any mailbox. Why not in Outlook for Mac? Yet again, Office for Mac customers get shortchanged.

They do say that the mailbox limitation is ‘currently’ for Microsoft hosted mailboxes only. But that’s a standard Microsoft Weasel Word™, used to deflect complaints and give false hope.