SearchExchange: Take it back! Recalling an e-mail message

October 21 2004

This sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered, but there are some serious limitations in recalling messages. For one thing, you can only recall messages that were sent to Exchange recipients. Messages sent to SMTP mailboxes can't be recalled because they do not exist in the Exchange Information Store. Second, you can't recall a message that has already been read. Third, and this is the biggie, the recalled message is not actually removed from the user's inbox. Instead, a second message is sent to the recipient with the word RECALL appended to the subject line. If the recipient opens the recall message, then the offending message will be deleted and a confirmation will be sent to the person who performed the recall. On the other hand, if the recipient opens the original message rather than the recall message, they will see the actual message that was sent by mistake.
That's it?  That's Exchange's often-hyped unsend feature?  I'd call it useless.  That will be the last time I take seriously the question of how Domino Access for MS-Outlook handles this.
Link: SearchExchange: Take it back! Recalling an e-mail message >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Microsoft  Add/View Comments [33]

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  1. 1  Bill http://www.bloglines.com/blog/zizzybaloobah | 10/21/2004 12:34:14 PM

    Most Exchange/Outlook users don't even realize that all those caveats exist. I remember at one place I was consulting a secretary sent out a global email introducing a new security personnel (good idea). She also mistakenly appended their cell phone and pager numbers (bad idea). The mis-appended numbers included a note that access to these phone numbers was supposed to be restricted (whoops!).

    Of course the secretary realized her mistake too late, and Outlook's lame recall feature probably resulted in only a handful of messages actually being removed.

  1. 2  Philip Storry  | 10/21/2004 1:23:38 PM

    Recalling messages is a lovely "headline feature". It gets people's attention. It looks good for the Executive Team, who feel assured that they can always recall anything they send.

    (Or that their PA's send. In my experience, many people on Executive Teams don't see much of their own email, even though it's now a commonplace tool. *sighs*)

    But there are, generally, two types of mistake. There's the invisible and the visible.

    Funnily enough, most people would class a mistake in an internal email as invisible. Think about it, and you'll see that it's true - they'll usually just forward their email to all the recipients with the correction clearly stated at the top. Most people wouldn't think to recall it even if they could. They'd rather admit a mistake and move on, because everyone has seen a mistake made in email.

    People only regard mistaken email as visible if it goes to those outside of the organisation. That reflects badly on the person, and by inferrance also on the organisation. When people call helpdesks worriedly asking if an email can be cancelled or recalled, it's usually because they just made a mistake in one going externally.

    And you can't recall external messages anyway.

    So in practice, it's always been a pretty useless feature. Exchange shops I've worked in/with always regarded it as a fantastic thing until they actually tried to use it.

  1. 3  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/21/2004 1:27:49 PM

    Okay... hands up. Who, seeing a message and then a recall notice appended to it, would want to look at the original message to find out why it was being recalled? The wife is sitting next to me and agrees.

    Isn't there also a caveat that the sender had to save the mail in order to refer to it when recalling? Who saves all their outgoing mail? Not everyone. Perhaps Exchange users do because their mails are less likely to get to their destination (ooh, little bit contraversial there, yes indeed).

  1. 4  Colin Williams http://www | 10/21/2004 1:55:57 PM

  1. 5  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 10/21/2004 2:00:49 PM

    I remember last year getting a recall message from a supplier...of course I opened the original (a quotation no less).

    It amused me to think that the sender attempted to even use such a feature - how on earth did he think it worked? especially outside of his own organisation?!

  1. 6  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 10/21/2004 2:04:57 PM

    ..."Messages sent to SMTP mailboxes can't be recalled because they do not exist in the Exchange Information Store"...

    Ok, based on my previous example, it seems that while SMTP messages can't be recalled, Outlook lets the user press the "recall button" anyway...and ultimately end up with egg on their face. Nice one Microsoft!

  1. 7  Declan Lynch  | 10/21/2004 2:12:35 PM

    I was asked today why Notes can't recall messages like outlook by one of the board members. I can't wait to go into the office tomorrow armed with this information :-)

  1. 8  Bill Geimer  | 10/21/2004 2:43:39 PM

    I guess Microsoft has finally stooped to competing with Groupwise, which still can recall a message. So could OfficeVision on VM, if I remember right. But then VM had a unitied message store too.

  1. 9  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/21/2004 2:45:29 PM

    What's it going to be... a half-baked retraction feature that doesn't do what it says on the box, or a mail system from Lotus that provides full clustering and disaster recovery so that you don't spend two days without mail when a disk fails? Some people seem to miss what's really important. This person is a member of your board Declan, so it's not my place to draw an opinion. But if I did draw one, you'd probably agree with it.

  1. 10  Alan Lepofsky www.ibm.com/partnerworld | 10/21/2004 3:20:42 PM

    Since so many people (at least in North America) use Blackberries (or similar) to instantly get their mail... what happens to them? Do those messages get recalled? ;-)

  1. 11  Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 10/21/2004 3:23:10 PM

    @7 (Declan)

    Also gently remind the board member that to make a major expenditure/migration absent a clear compelling business case that supports a specific, measureable business objective is a clear indicator of weak corporate/information systems governance.

    Mail retraction would *NOT* generally fall under this category.

  1. 12  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 10/21/2004 3:28:53 PM

    guys, guys...Declan's on our side! ;)

  1. 13    | 10/21/2004 3:47:56 PM

    I find it appalling that you just now discovered this about the competition.

  1. 14  Kitty http://t-hinks.blogspot.com | 10/21/2004 3:59:24 PM

    I knew that! (feeling ever-so-slightly-amazed). I stay away from commenting on this very often as the community is so much more knowledgeable than me, but for once I knew that! Just had to say ;)

  1. 15  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 10/21/2004 4:11:31 PM

    @13 -

    Dear anonymous Motorolan,

    I knew that it was a suboptimal feature, but didn't know how broken it really was. But I'm a sales/marketing guy, not a developer, so I hadn't ever dug into it in detail.

    Why is this "appalling"? And how is your Exchange environment doing these days anyway?

  1. 16  Tom E  | 10/21/2004 4:16:07 PM

    I once had to write a script to delete a 32 Mb email that was sent by mistake to 500 mobile executives who only connected via replication on 28.8 modems.

    I know, this kind of feature would be easy to abuse, but when you need this kind of feature, you usually need it in the worst way.

  1. 17  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/21/2004 4:28:38 PM

    #12 - I know Declan's on our side, I was making the point to agree with him.

    #13 - nope, like Ed I've known about it for years. We just happened to have started a discussion in reaction to the article. It's usually an easy argument to quash. If an Exchange advocate wants to get into a "we've got this feature" argument I'm always available. Bring it on.

  1. 18  Philip Storry  | 10/21/2004 5:16:48 PM

    Tom E [16],

    Actually, that gives me a thought - the very architecture of Domino/Notes gives us a huge advatage here.

    Because we could write our own "Recall" tool if we felt we needed one. And it would be a heck of a lot better than the one under scrutiny here!

    Think about it. If you knew the message ID (not the document ID, but the unique message ID) then you could easily trawl the mail database for it and completely delete the message. If wouldn't be as slow as you'd think (especially if all your user's mail databases were full-text indexed), and if you threw a new hidden view into the mail database which sorted by the correct field you'd be laughing.

    The user wants a message deleted. We go look at the message and grab its message ID. Drop a message deletion request into our message deletion database. An agent is triggered by the new/modified request, and does its work across all the user's mail databases on that server. If the database is replicated on a rapid frequency across the domain, you could have "recalled" the mail within an hour or two. Whether or not anyone has read it.

    You could probably make the agent more/less intelligent as you required. (For instance, only dealing with mail files "homed" on a server if the server is part of a cluster).

    I never did much development with Exchange Server, but I don't think its architecture allows the sort of access you'd need to handle message recall in this way. Anyone know for sure?

  1. 19  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 10/21/2004 5:48:28 PM

    There are two Domino-related mail recall tools on the market that I know of ... Fetch and Demailer. Not sure how widely they've been adopted.

  1. 20  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 10/21/2004 5:59:59 PM

    @10 (Alan)

    Well, if the recall "feature" deleted the email then yes the email on the Blackberry would mysteriously disappear.

    I played this trick recently with one of my users..."full admin access"..."delete test emails" and blame him for pressing wrong buttons on the Blackberry when he gasped "hey, where'd they go?!" :)

  1. 21  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 10/21/2004 8:13:47 PM

    So many good comments, but I'm looking for the one that mentions that at least in the US, tampering with the mail is a federal offense. Why would anyone knowingly want a recall function? Maybe the lack of such a function is a deterant to clicking the send button without some thought.

    That said, the Group-Technologies product has a great DB job function that would go through each file, and remove the errant message in Domino. Though getting to the message before they read it is a real trick.

  1. 22  Danny Lawrence  | 10/21/2004 9:32:01 PM

    Hey Ed, like the "anonymous Morotolan" I too find it appaling that you just discovered the lameness of this Exchanged "feature" -- usually you do a much better job of trashing MSFT marketing claims :-)

  1. 23  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net/bensblog.nsf | 10/22/2004 4:21:06 AM

    "tampering with the mail is a federal offense" - but did anyone discover yet if this applied to email???

  1. 24  Arnd Layer  | 10/22/2004 5:03:08 AM

    @ 21

    I fully agree. giving this feature to the end user is legally dangerous. If such a feature cannot be deactivated, it would be a good reason not to buy the product.

    I'd allways inplement aprocess to approve and log mail revocation, if required. There may be good reasons to revoke a message (if information, the receiver legally cannot see, was sent, e.g. salaries, ...).

  1. 25  David  | 10/22/2004 5:30:59 AM

    I remember having the most wonderful gratitude bestowed on me when a female colleague needed to cancel a cc:Mail message. Luckily for her it was still sat in 'post office' waiting for a dial-up to the US. Ah! Those were the days!

  1. 26  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 10/22/2004 6:20:37 AM

    ah yes, in the cc:Mail days... bankshot routing provided for interesting possibilities with regard to mail delivery interference. My favorite story appears in this blog entry from last year... { Link } which also happens to be about e-mail retraction.

  1. 27  Mike Brown  | 10/22/2004 7:06:43 AM

    My argument, whenever I hear about Exchange/Outlook's "recall" feature, is that my mailbox is just that: it's MY mailbox. If you put something in there that you shouldn't have, then that's your problem. Whatever it is belongs to me now. On your knees at my desk if you don't want me to read it (fat chance).

    Here's our "recall" feature. It's called "watch what the **** you're doing, dummy! And if you don't know the difference between Reply and Reply to All, then you've got no business working on a computer in the first place, have you?"

  1. 28  Nathan T. Freeman  | 10/22/2004 7:31:23 AM

    Actually Philip [18] it's even easier than that. The router attempts to (and generally succeeds at) maintaining the UNID of the original message when the mail is routed. As a result, if you have the original message, chances are it has the same UNID in the target database.

    I've actually considered writing this feature into the OpenNTF Mail template several times, but have not been able to come up with a satisfactory control model for it. Basically, the only reasonable way I can think of to implement is similar to the Administrative Requests system. An enterprise admin, an individual server admin, and the recipient of the original message can all reasonably want to turn the feature off for their environment -- which means you have to make the behavior brokered, rather than direct.

    It's only the control model that's hard. Actually killing the right message is fairly easy.

  1. 29  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 10/22/2004 4:06:09 PM

    @ 27, Mike

    That's what I'm talking about. How can I assure the person wanting to recall a message that their mail is safe from outside interference, while allowing them to interfere with delivered mail? I'll go one step more than Mike and say that once it's in the mail stream, it is no longer in the possession of the sender.

    BTW. Postal mail is what this email is modeled after. No, it's probably not a federal offense, but maybe it should be.

  1. 30  Dave Navarre  | 11/3/2004 2:45:31 PM

    Depending on what mail system the message is sent on (that is, who owns it) and the contents of the message (I think, but am not certain), it may be a violation of at least SEC regulations to delete the message from the system. I suspect that certain email system owners would be aghast that someone might delete such messages and would suggest that if you create a tool to do this, you find a place to park the documents removed from the mailboxes.

    I wrote an agent back about 7 years ago that searched the mailboxes of everyone at my company for a particular attachment that was a virus (that would have attached Outlook, not Notes) and then removed the file from the message. Since I had no clue what I was doing, it took a very long time to run, sometimes stopped running and was not very pretty - but it did the job.

    I'm not surprised Ed didn't know all the details. I mean, MSFT products have so many problems, no one can know ALL of them..... ;-)

  1. 31  Daniel Goss  | 6/27/2008 5:18:35 AM

    re Colin Williams

    The email will not be deleted on the Blackberry even if it is successfully recalled. Emails disappear from a BB when they enter the deleted items folder. On a successfull recall the email will not go to the deleted items folder, so will not be removed off the BB!

  1. 32  Kerr  | 1/7/2009 5:19:23 AM

    @ed, Wow @32 has to be the most sophisticated blog spam I've seen to date. Congratulations ;)