Melissa wrote:
> If have sent an email, can I pull it back from the recipient if they have
> not opened it yet? How do I do that?
Recall rarely works across different e-mail servers. It only sometimes
works when both sender and recipient are using the same Exchange server (or
Exchange servers within the same organization); however, if you are sending
e-mails via SMTP, the chance of Recall working is dismal. That means rather
than issuing a recall *function* to the Exchange server to yank out the
original e-mail from the recipient's mailbox, you are sending a *new* e-mail
that requests the recipient's mail client to remove an item AFTER the mail
client has downloaded the original message from their mailbox. That means
the e-mail client must understand the encoded Message-ID header in your 2nd
new e-mail that makes the recall request. It also requires that the
recipient open the recall e-mail BEFORE they open your original e-mail - and
that means the recipient would need to have e-mails listed in descending
sort order rather than ascending sort order. If the recipient opens your
original e-mail (which they WILL already have downloaded) before opening
your recall e-mail then they can obviously read the original message because
they have not first opened your recall e-mail which then attempts (in
Outlook only) to delete the original e-mail.
Even if the recipient reads their e-mails in descending sort order, it is
unlikely that their e-mail client knows how to handle a recall. The
Microsoft-specific non-standard modification of the Message-ID header (by
adding the "!-!" prefix and encoding information within the userID portion
before the "@" character) is used to indicate a recall but it is only
recognized by Outlook (and the recipients have to read e-mails in descending
order so they open your recall e-mail first) so don't expect the recall to
work. A recipient using anything other than Outlook 2000+, like Outlook
Express, will see both the original message and recall messages and first
opening the recall e-mail will NOT delete the original e-mail. Non-Outlook
e-mail clients don't know how to handle the recall request that is encoded
within the Message-ID header.
If using Exchange to send your e-mails which were sent to a recipient also
using the same Exchange organization then recall might work because the mail
server is handling the request to delete messages from the recipient's
mailbox. Recall won't work unless both sender and recipient use Outlook
2000+ and the recipient happens to open the recall e-mail first.
At this point, and if you are the sender, you should send another new e-mail
to correct your mistake in your original e-mail or to apologize for the
content of your first e-mail. Getting a recall e-mail will only draw more
attention by the recipient to your original e-mail.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197094/en-us
If you read the help already included in Outlook to search on "recall", it
would have plainly stated "This feature requires Microsoft Exchange". For
SMTP, there is a miniscule possibility that if the recipient also uses
Outlook then the recall via the encoded Message-ID directive will work since
Outlook handles that non-Exchange method. It rarely works.
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