OT: Email recall - What was the point?

[Andrej Marjan]

On May 25, 2010 11:27:49 am you wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:12:02AM -0400, William Muriithi wrote:
> > Once in a while, I get to assist someone who need recalling a mail. I
> > have never seen one work. Personally, I would not even bother with it.
> > However, it look like everybody know about the feature which mean it
> > was well marketed, so the best way is to attempt it so that the user
> > does not blame us for not attempting it.
> > 
> > Which bring the question, why did Microsoft ever place such a useless
> > feature on their application? When was it ever able to work?  I
> > suspect it was only for local mail, but they should have put the
> > disclaimer along the feature
> > 
> > Anyway, not really a question, but a morning rant.
> 
> I have only ever heard of the feature on outlook, so yes it almost
> certainly only works with exchange and probably only locally.

If it worked with Exchange, then it might actually be an 80% solution instead 
of the 20% solution that it actually is.

I suppose MS may have finally fixed this, but it used to be the case that the 
recall emails were processed exclusively by the Outlook client some seconds 
*or minutes* after receipt of the recall message. If they'd made the damned 
mail server handle things, you wouldn't have "recalled" messages sitting 
around in people's inboxes for so long.

Personally I think the first few versions of Outlook were designed and built by 
drunken co-op students. Certainly they weren't done by anyone who understood 
email, or desktop applications.

> Users really ought to clue into the fact that once you send an email,
> it is sent and there is no undo or recall because it is now on someone
> elses server and it isn't your decision anymore.

I thought the French military had added this functionality to Trustedbird, but 
it turns out they didn't even try, and instead added notification on message 
deletion:

http://www.trustedbird.org/tb/MDN_Extended

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