Recall sent emails in Outlook

I believe sometimes you landed yourself in a situation where you want to stop an Outlook email from being delivered and read. You tried desperately hitting the “Esc” key on your keyboard, but this doesn’t help much…

There may be times where you send an email but quickly realize that you didn’t mean to send it, or you noticed an error in the email that needs to be fixed. So, how do you recall a sent email in Microsoft Outlook?

Recall email

  1. From Microsoft Outlook, open the “Sent Items” folder.
  2. Double-click the email you wish to recall. This will open it in a new window.
  3. Select “Actions” – “Recall this message”.
  4. Choose to either delete unread copies of the email or delete unread copies of the email, replacing it with a new message.
  5. Check or uncheck “Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient” as desired.
  6. Click “OK”.
  7. If you chose to replace the e-mail, enter in your new message and send it afterwards.

Looks easy enough. But in order for a recall to be successful, there are a few conditions which are listed below:

  1. The recipient must also be using Microsoft Outlook. Recipients using another email software may not recognize recall actions.
  2. The recipient’s email server has to recognize the recall actions.
  3. Recall will not work if the recipient has already read the email.

Now you know how to recall an email mistakenly sent to your wife, which is actually meant for your giflfriend? 🙂