How to Recall or Replace Email in Outlook?

MS Outlook is a prevalent email client application with usage ranging from the corporate world to individual users. Outlook, with its gaining popularity and a massive user base, has almost no rooms for errors and bugs. Although, with such an extensive user base, mistakes are quite obvious. It has been reported that a lot of users face a premature ‘Send’ clicked while drafting an email; it leads to an embarrassing situation where your unfinished email is on its way to the recipient’s Inbox, and you get stand stuck in that situation.

However, if you are using Outlook on a collaborative platform like Microsoft Exchange Server, then it comes with certain advantages over standard Outlook account users. Features like the ability to search multiple mailboxes, enhanced security features, and the ability to recall or even replace an email are the most significant factors that make Outlook outstanding under a collaborative communication server.

If you are facing the same situation where you find yourself in need to recall and replace an email message already sent, then you must know that there are specific criteria under which an email is recalled or replaced in the Outlook platform.

Criteria for Recalling/Replacing an Email in Outlook

You can recall and replace an email already delivered to the recipient’s Inbox but only if the following conditions are met:

1. Both the sender’s and the receiver’s Outlook program must share a collaborative communication platform such as Microsoft Exchange Server.
2. The recipient’s email program must be running while processing the recall.
3. The original email message delivered must remain untouched by the receiver.
4. The original message must remain intact from services like a rule, spam filters, or add-ins.

Now, we will go through the step-by-step process of recalling an email message in Outlook and replacing it, if desired.

Steps to Recall emails in Outlook and replace it, if desired

Suppose that you have accidentally mailed an email containing errors to one of your colleagues within the same organization. Now the situation requires that you withdraw/recall that email message and replace it with a new one.

To recall an email in Outlook 2016 and later versions, perform the following steps as per the order given.

Step 1: Open Outlook and go to the Sent Mail folder.

Step 2: Select the email you want to recall and double-click to open the message in a new window.

Step 3: Click on the More Move Actions button from the Move Ribbon and select Recall This Message.

Step 4: Select the desired option from the Recall This Message dialog box. The two options provided under the Recall function are:

1. Delete unread copies of this message
2. Delete unread copies and replace with a new message

Make sure to check the Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient checkbox. Select the appropriate option as per your requirement and click OK.

Step 5: If you have selected the Delete unread copies and replace with a new message option, draft a new email by modifying the previous one and click on the Send button.

After completion of the above steps, you will receive an email notifying whether the recall has been successful or not.

In case you failed to retract or replace the email, the following message appears on the email.

Governing factors that determine the end-results of a recall function

The parameters of a successful recall not only depend on the requirements listed above but to some extent, it also depends on the configurational settings of the recipient’s Outlook client.

The following factors govern the end-results of a recall function:

1. For a successful recall, the original message must remain unread. Otherwise, both original email and the new one, along with the notification to recall, will be available to the recipient.
2. If the Automatically process meeting requests and responses to meeting requests and polls feature is enabled by the recipient, then the end-results of the recall entirely depends on whether the original email is marked read or unread.
3. In case the recipient has defined a rule stating that the original message and the recall message should be moved to different folders, then irrespective of the fact that the message is marked read or unread, the recall function will fail.
4. It must be noted that if you are using Outlook on a mobile device and attempt to make a recall, the process will likely fail.

Most of the times, bugs and internal errors are also responsible for degrading the workflow of an application; issues like corruption in PST affects various function and features of the software. If you have PST corruption issues in your Outlook platform then instead of going for long tedious manual techniques to repair PST, it is always recommended to use a reliable third-party tool to fix the issue.

Outlook PST Recovery is one of the most widely used and recommended repair tools to fix common errors and corruption issues in your PST. Always make sure that your Outlook client is running healthy before carrying out any specific operation.

Download, install, and run the software on your machine and ensure complete recovery of your PST files. The default interface of the tool will look something like this:

Conclusion

You clicked the Send button accidentally while drafting an email in MS Outlook and wondering what to do next? You can recall the mail if you are using Outlook in an Exchange environment, provided the mail remains unread with the recipient. Here, we will show how you can do that. Also, we introduce a professional tool to deal with PST corruption issues.