This cool little trick can save you from embarrassing email mistakes

You write an email, send it out and the second you hit “send” realize you forgot to add an attachment, link or something else. Then you immediately send another email with an apologetic “sorry forgot to add this…”. Yeah, happens to the best of us.

Luckily the new versions of Apple Mail on macOS have a built-in feature that will save you from the embarrassing follow-up corrections. The catch? You only have a few seconds to act if you need to unsend an email. It’s easy when you know exactly what to do and how to do it, so you almost need to practice for this before actually using it. Here’s a quick tutorial on how the “undo send” function works on Apple Mail.

How to edit an email you already sent

The process can happen unnoticced in the background so here’s a breakdown of how to edit an email you already sent. Every time you send an email the Mail app uses a small delay before the email is actually delivered to the recipients. When you click send, you’ll see a small icon labeled “Undo Send” show up in the bottom left corner of the Mail app. It stays visibly only for a few seconds, so if you want to unsend the email, you have to act fast. Just click “Undo Send” and the email will return back to you for any necessary edits. Make adjustments and click send again.

Adjusting the delay for Unsend Email -feature

Personally my biggest frustration was that the time window for unsending emails was too short. I would send emails at work, then move on to the next thing and realize I forgot to add something to my email when it was already too late. There is an option to change the delay so if you’d like it to be longer go to your Mail Settings and under Composing change the “undo send delay”. Currently in macOS Sonoma you can choose between 10, 20 and 30 seconds, but personally I wouldn’t mind if there was an option to set it to a minute or two.