Have you ever written an e-mail, clicked the 'Send' button,and then realized a fraction of a second to a couple of hours later a really foolish mistake you've made in the text? (Lets face it, this is not a medium well suited to deliberative editing.) And sometimes a correction e-mail is just embarrasing.
You should have the right to recall(ie delete) or edit unopened emails. It would be, I guess, in the form of a coded e-mail which would tell the receiver program what to do with that (hopefully still unopened) offending letter. Of course the time stamp would also change.
What do you think?
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
The original Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) provided no way of recalling internet messages, but certain mail system vendors have added the feature in to their own software (MS Outlook / Exchange spring to mind). You can't always guarantee that it will work when you try to recall a message, as it may have already been read, forwarded, printed, moved to an offline folder, etc, etc. There's also certain security bits to be considered. Supposing you'd sent out an email to ten people, one of which was me. I would have the message-id in the headers, and I'd know where else the message had been sent to. So I just pretend to be you, and send a 'recall' message to the mail servers of every other address, and your email gets recalled. Provided, of course, that every mail server which received the email was up to date, and knew how to process recall commands. It's possible that many people just wouldn't bother upgrading their mail server software. And even then, if you sent a message to me, and it got to my mail server, once it had arrived, it would be placed in a POP3 mailbox. So you'd need the SMTP software to be capable of passing on the recall command to my POP3 server. In order to work in the real world, not only would the SMTP protocol have to be updated, but also all of the different kinds of server concerned with how the message is stored and accessed by it's intended recipient. So that's POP3, IMAP and all the proprietary formats, such as MS Exchange, Lotus Domino, CC:Mail, Novell Groupwise, to name but a few. And let's say I've already downloaded the message into Outlook, or Eudora or Evolution, or whatever. I've read it. The POP3 (or IMAP) server needs to tell my desktop computer that the message has been recalled. It can't do that until the next time I dial up to the internet and connect to it, because although it's a server which always lives in the same 'place', the internet address of my computer is different. So, 9 hours after I first received your message, instructing me to sell all your shares in whynot.net - you recall the message and send another one in its place, instructing me to buy more whynot.net shares. 2 hours after that, I dial-up to the internet to check my mail. The first message is recalled, and a new message from you arrives. It's too late. I've already carried out the first instruction. And because the recalled message has gone, I can't prove you ever instructed me to sell the shares. Whynot.net stock rockets up from $1 per share to $189. You deny ever sending the original message, sue me for the loss, and I have one hell of a time proving that you ever sent the first message. I think I'd stick with software that didn't respond to recall commands.
whoops. Bit that I forgot to get around in the first posing was the 'unopened' part. In my little scenario where you end up suing me, I've only opened the email in the preview pane, and so my email software hasn't marked it as being 'read'. So, while I've read it and acted on it, my copy of outlook doesn't have the 'mark messages viewed in the preview pane as read after NN seconds' box checked, and so its still officially an 'unread' mail. This really is a conundrum for the Internet Engineering Task Force.
adamt:
That sure is a looooonnnnnggggg paragraph!!--Communication of this type should be easy to read,just like any newspaper.