Have you ever thought about time travel? Imagine going back in time. You could go back and meet famous figures like the founder of your country. However, just imagine if you could go back in time a little bit and correct a mistake you made. Perhaps you said something to your boss in anger and wish you could take back your words. Perhaps you sent an email to someone and wish you could stop them from reading it somehow.
Unfortunately, email does not have an unsend option. There is no way to retrieve an email which has already been sent. Why is it that email is missing something so important? The answer goes back to the simple fact that email was created a very long time ago and it does not work for the way we communicate today.
From a technical perspective, SMTP (the protocol for sending email) does not support any sort of 'cancel specific message' in its set of commands. It is possible for some email servers to do this but there is a major problem with it. As one example, Exchange (Microsoft's email server) does support unsending. However, this is really only useful in the corporate environment where you and the recipient are both using the same Exchange server. This is because Exchange supports this logic but it is not in the 'email standards.' If you use Exchange as your email server but the recipient does not, then your email will not be unsent. This is because your Exchange server would need to connect to the recipient's email server and not many email servers support this concept.
Email involves a message flowing from server to server to server. You might think that at most there would be only two servers involved (your server and the recipient's server). However, email was designed so that a message can 'move on down the road' from server to server to server until, eventually, reaching its destination. While this might have made sense decades ago, in today's high-bandwidth world it no longer makes sense. Still, we have been stuck with it, until TrulyMail came along.
With TrulyMail it is simple. You open the message from your Sent Items folder and, if the recipient has not received the message, yet, then you can unsend it and that message is canceled so that the recipient will never receive it.
So, time travel is possible, to a very limited extent. However, this one little feature, we believe, will make you much more comfortable. Knowing you can 'undo' sending a message (albeit with limitations) should help everyone to communicate better.
Once again, TrulyMail helps us by giving us something email never could.
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