Funny Question
May 13, 2008 by dave
So I got asked a funny question at work last month and I needed a post today so I bring it up now.
A user noticed that Microsoft Outlook has a feature called Recall Message and one called Replace Message.
With this feature, if you send an e-mail to someone using an Exchange Server for their e-mail, then you hit Recall Message, it will actually stop an e-mail that you’ve sent to the person under 2 conditions.
1) The person you have sent the e-mail message has not read the message.
2) The person to whom you have sent the e-mail message is not even logged on to their account.
Essentially what this feature seems to be for is the user that sends a bridge burning e-mail to their superior on a Friday afternoon, after he’s peeked out and sees there are no cars in the parking lot and then on weekend when he realizes with abject horror that no, those numbers that matched his lotto ticket are from last weeks draw (oops) , so he slinks in at 5:00 am on Monday morning to pray to the IT deities that this one in a million shot works.
There is a reason why this feature would never ever work in a wider environment.
The reason is of course that any IT person asked to set this up would immediately murder the person asking for it.
You know why?
Because the people who would want it are the same people that come to your desk 15 seconds after they send an e-mail saying that the party in question hasn’t received it yet, what’s wrong with your damn e-mail server?
Of course the It person could simply access that person’s email account and then send the nuclear email.
But how do you stop the prompt that says, “The sender would like to recall this message? Will you allow it?”
I think that feature is just cruel.
Okay, maybe I’m reading this wrong and misunderstanding it as well, but it sounds like this…they have the recall message that can be recalled, when mistakenly sent, from his/her computer, and a replace message - I assume that is supposed to mean replace the message that was recalled, as records may have been kept that an email was sent and whoever looks at it will wonder where the message went if nothing is replacing the recalled message. So, if this feature is out there somewhere, I think it has its pro’s and con’s, just like any other program out there. Start learning about it Dave for you could get very rich off of saving all those idiot’s bacons!
Ha! I used to use that feature all the damn time. And it never worked for me, not once.
So instead, I stopped sending angry emails without first thinking about ‘em. Haven’t had a near-bridge-burning since.