Mail recall in Domino 8

June 8 2009

Collin Murray, the Domino product manager, and I just finished up a conference call with a customer talking about the Notes/Domino 8 "mail recall" feature.  The customer had questions and concerns about how this feature would work in their (regulated) environment, what the limitations are, and what the experience has been in customers who have turned it on.

What was interesting about preparing for this call is the relative dearth of information about how you all are using mail recall in Notes/Domino since the feature shipped.  There's a handful of postings in the forums on developerWorks, and a smattering of blog entries over the last 24 months or so.  On the whole, though, there's not much discussion of implementing this feature, it's benefits and challenges, or best practices in using recall.

So, seems like a good discussion topic.  Are you using or planning to use mail recall?  Why or why not?  What resources have you found to help you make these decisions?

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Notes and Domino 8  Add/View Comments [27]

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  1. 1  Mitch Cohen http://www.curiousmitch.com | 6/8/2009 10:47:31 AM

    Mail recall is off for a number of reasons, but this is the main one { Link }

  1. 2  JYR http://jyriver.blogspot.com/ | 6/8/2009 11:08:32 AM

    A good discussion back in 2007 about setting it On or Off

    { Link }

    As new feature, you have to explain it (Training, reference cards. etc) to your users. We're gonna look at it.

    JYR

  1. 3  Sascha Troll  | 6/8/2009 11:10:16 AM

    Off due to blackberries and replication with iNotes server

  1. 4  Brett  | 6/8/2009 11:21:05 AM

    Definitely on, and touted as a "cool new feature" and well received. It's fairly self explanetory so no real "training" as such required with our users, just a mention in the tip-sheet.

  1. 5  Ken Hawkins  | 6/8/2009 11:26:59 AM

    We have started deploying ND8/85 in our organization this year. The Message Recall feature is one of the "Wow" items (along with live text) that our user are happy to see in these releases.

    Users are told the conditions for using Message Recall and seem to have no problem understanding the limitations.

    Most users (including myself) have used the feature when sending an email where a needed attachment has been accidentally omitted.

    Over the years I've had to tell users they couldn't retrieve a sent message in Notes and experienced the "but I could do this in Outlook" response. Message Recall is a welcome addition to the product in my opinion.

  1. 6  David Bell  | 6/8/2009 11:45:30 AM

    It's a tickbox on a feature list, but I suspect it will cause a lot more helpdesk calls than it's worth. Not only from those users who actually try to make use of it, but also from users who are on the receiving end.

    The ability to retrieve a message has too many exception cases that users will never remember and these are not Notes specific.

    Changing mailing list memberships are likely to be the single biggest cause of not being able to decide whether a message will or will not be completely recalled (because users have been removed), not to mention users getting the notices when they never received the original message (because they have been added to the group since that time).

    I for one am not a big fan; could you tell ?

    I'm all for personal responsibility and not providing yet another reason for users to not think about what they are doing.

  1. 7  Tim Haugen  | 6/8/2009 11:55:56 AM

    After a lot of discussion around the FUD, we rolled 8 with Recall enabled. It's been far less trouble than we had feared. People seem to understand that it's a "best effort" attempt. I agree with the "think before you send" for something offensive or important/confidential. I've only used recall once, and more to save eMail clutter and explanation - can't remember exactly what, but something along the lines of forgetting to include the attachment, or forgetting to cc someone who obviously should have been.

  1. 8  Maria Helm  | 6/8/2009 12:03:55 PM

    @Ken Hawkins - Exactly what we experienced. We were dubious about rolling it out, but like you wanted to counter the "outlook does it" mentality.

    We included a brief explanation of the conditions, and brief instructions, in our "R8 Rollout Brochure". Users seemed to "get it", with very few questions and lots of kudos.

    I love that the last time a VP accidentally sent a message to the wrong group of people, he recalled it, and then called to let me know it worked! (Instead of me having to manually delete the message from 200 mailfiles.)

  1. 9  Bill Malchisky http://www.EffectiveSoftware.com | 6/8/2009 12:09:29 PM

    For my clients, the company culture and policy dictates its enablement. Some regulated firms love it, as they receive fewer Help Desk calls for pulling-back mail. One non-regulated firm didn't want it, as they didn't want to understand it (corporate politics can be interesting). The Internet restriction is cited in either training or a company briefing/memo.

    Overall from my perspective, most firms to which I've interfaced embrace it, and just restrict it to a point that is comfortable for their corporate policy.

  1. 10  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 6/8/2009 12:11:18 PM

    Laws in other countries sometimes restrict how an employer can access a mail file. I believe Germany does not allow a company to go into an employees mailfile to delete an email even though it is company mail.

  1. 11  Henny Breijer http://www.breijer.com | 6/8/2009 12:19:19 PM

    At least one of my Premium Support customers is using a third-party application to recall e-mails. I think they will eventually sunset this application in favour of the out-of-the-box feature if it proofs to be at least as good as the third-party solution they are using now.

  1. 12  Palmi  | 6/8/2009 12:28:11 PM

    its "On" and a great feature and when it used it one less email i have to read :)

  1. 13  LongLiveLotus  | 6/8/2009 1:12:27 PM

    I can't give a single example of any user actually using this feature, in fact I'd guess they don't even know it's there...

    Interesting as this was given as a key reason for us to use to our current email system which is'nt Notes and is'nt the one beginning with Ou.....

    Point is, my guess is this is pretty common regardless of which technology is used

    YMMV

  1. 14  David Jones http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/jonesy/ | 6/8/2009 1:39:58 PM

    We're using mail recall here but only allowing the recall of the message if it is unread and setting the limit to only the last 3 days.

    Why 3 days? I have no idea.

  1. 15  Tim Tripcony http://www.timtripcony.com | 6/8/2009 2:54:38 PM

    The whole premise still creeps me out: it sends the signal to end users that it's okay to exercise less caution when addressing email because the system will clean up the mess when they realize they weren't paying attention... or exercised poor judgment. I'm glad to see that some organizations deploying this feature are providing well-received training on it, but I still disagree with the mindset underlying the request for this feature to be added in the first place.

    The only occasions I've ever been asked by a user to recall a message (and each incident was prior to R8) were when some end user had accidentally disclosed confidential information - sent one customer's data to another customer, proprietary internal data to a competitor, etc. In other words, they'd just done something that was technically grounds for termination, and they were hoping Domino would let them "get away with it". Any feature that tells users it's okay to be less vigilant about securing confidential information - even internally to an organization (I've worked for several companies where an employee in one business unit wasn't even allowed to know that some company was a customer of another business unit) - just doesn't sit well with me.

  1. 16  Colin Williams http://guttedgeek.posterous.com | 6/8/2009 2:56:16 PM

    We had it turned on and it worked well. Recently we deployed an email archive system that breaks it because the archive contains all email.

  1. 17  Rob S  | 6/8/2009 3:10:06 PM

    We have it on and it generally works adequately.

    However, it is a bit confusing when the user gets multiple recall status messages back (apparently, one per mail server involved).

    Also, we ran into a very significant limitation: if you recall an email sent to more than a small number of people, you cannot open the recall status messages (you get an error about exceeding a limit). Thus, it is difficult to know what happened if you try to recall an email sent to a substantial group of people.

    Additionally, it seems there are times the recall doesn't work well and the request gets stuck in the router. I haven't debugged this (way too many other bugs to deal with that are more important), but it may have to do with when a user cuts a file from their "sent" view and moves it to another nsf database for storage--then realizes they need to recall the message.

    The feature is certainly a very important feature and well received. It just seems to have a few rough edges.

  1. 18  Jeff Twardowski http://www.ardeninc.com | 6/8/2009 4:29:19 PM

    Hello,

    The technical and user concept of message recall seem fairly straight forward. What I have not heard is how legal liability effects message recall. For example, if my system is setup to recall a message even if I read it, am I liable for its content even if it is not there any more? I know insurance companies seem to have some interesting perspectives on liability of email. I think this is the side of message recall that has not been explored satisfactorily.

    Thanks,

    Jeff

  1. 19  JFranchetti  | 6/8/2009 5:01:24 PM

    We plan to enable it with our deployment.

    We are putting in a "pop-up box" when you initiate it that highlights some of the constraints (mainly, "it doesn't work for Internet messages... etc").

  1. 20  Devin Olson http://www.devinolson.net | 6/8/2009 5:27:23 PM

    As I stated on Chris' site, "Those who need the ability to recall sent email lack the intellectual capacity to use email in the first place, and should be denied access to such."

  1. 21  Dumitru B.  | 6/9/2009 4:56:19 AM

    Please, help, how to solve this: "Message was not found" after recall?

  1. 22  Dumitru B.  | 6/9/2009 5:18:53 AM

    I found this problem in LN8 forum on IBM, with this point: "RecallMessageID = <number@LocalDomain>", and the answer is somewhere: { Link }

    where?

  1. 23  Mark Dowling http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com | 6/9/2009 10:42:25 AM

    We don't use it since it doesn't extend beyond the firewall (and those are the ones we'd want to recall the most!) I didn't know there was a Blackberry issue though (@3 above).

    What I would prefer to see is a "Gmail Beer Goggles" option where we could throttle the router to delay mail delivery to the mail files/SMTP gateway for X minutes. This gives equality of impact inside and outside the firewall.

  1. 24    | 6/9/2009 12:26:12 PM

    As much as I wanted to leave this comment, no anonymous comments are allowed on edbrill.com.

  1. 25  Clayton Price  | 6/10/2009 1:28:55 AM

    @5 is bang on. We should provide for our customers and new features (with the necessary qualifiers) are the life blood of product longevity..... and career longevity for ND people!

    Do the people that don't agree with it's use also remove the backspace key from their customers keyboards??? Surely with the required "intellectual capacity" you would never make a typing error !!!

    Assuming @20 is joking !

  1. 26  Collin Murray  | 6/11/2009 12:24:18 PM

    Thanks all for the comments! Glad to see that value is being leveraged. I realize that like automobiles, etc. not every product feature applies to everyone (for city driving, the built-in tv/dvd player doesn't make sense for me...).

    Collin

  1. 27  Martin http://martinhumpolec.cz/blog | 7/2/2009 1:57:47 AM

    @23 - you could do it by setting longer interval in Connection document for SMTP server, don't you?