Retrieving e-mails sent unintentionally

Zatni Arbi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

You have just received an e-mail message, quite a nasty one, and it happens to be one of those bad days in your life. You quarreled with your spouse before you left for work this morning. An hour ago you received a call from a Citibank employee reminding you that you had not made any payment on your credit cards for three consecutive months. The e-mail could not have arrived at a worse time.

Right away you click on the Reply button and start typing a hot response. You are boiling with anger, you are mad and therefore cannot think clearly. What the heck! You grab the mouse, and then click on the "Send" button. Ten seconds later, you realize that you were actually talking back to your boss. You frantically yank the UTP cable that connects your PC to the office LAN. Too late, the message has gone out to the server.

Like in one of those Harrison Ford movies, you rush to your boss' office, sneak in as he happens to have stepped out, go to his computer and try several different passwords to log in with lightning speed. With an unbelievable amount of Harrison Ford luck, you succeed in deleting the offensive note that could have ended your career at the company before your boss sees it.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a tool or mechanism to retract the e-mail that you have inadvertently sent to someone without having to act as quickly and smartly as Harrison?

If both you and your unfortunate recipient use Microsoft Outlook 2002 and your company uses Microsoft Exchange, you may be able to do it, as the e-mail client program already incorporates a feature that enables you to recall an already delivered e-mail message.

There is one crucial prerequisite, though: The high explosive e-mail has to be in his Inbox folder. If the e-mail has been moved to another folder, you had better start polishing your resume. Again, if he is not using Outlook 2002, you will be out of luck.

Deleting is not easy

A friend once posted a message on a Yahoo e-mail group that I had set up. A couple of minutes afterward he realized that it should have been sent to an individual member instead of the entire group. He quickly e-mailed me and asked me, as the moderator of the group, to erase the message before it got distributed to the other members. No luck there, as Yahoo does not allow moderators to erase any posted messages. We have to send Yahoo support a special request if we really need to have a posted message taken out.

Sending e-mail messages that should never have left our computer is not an uncommon incident. Some companies do offer services that enable us to have more control of our e-mail messages. Using their services, we can have a message digitally erase itself right after it is read, set an expiry date for it so that it can no longer be accessed after a predetermined period of time, prevent it from being printed or forwarded, etc.

One good example is Atabok (atabok.com). With its rather expensive monthly charge of US$40.00 per user, the service is certainly not targeted to individuals. Atabok allows a corporate user to send an e-mail message and its attachment in a secure way with encryption, determine whether he wants the e-mail to be digitally shredded immediately after being viewed by its recipient, and even track every single thing that happens to it even after it has been delivered into the recipient's Inbox. The secret is that each mail has to go through their VCN server.

Another company that provides a similar service is Omniva Policy System (omniva.com). If you want the ability to block your recipient's access to an e-mail message that has already been delivered, Authentica (authentica.com) offers a tool called MailRecall. Using digital rights, MailRecall can help make it impossible for the recipient to read the e-mail message if you alter his right.

A program to retract already-delivered e-mail called ActiveTracker can also be downloaded from ZDNet. However, it is still a piece of immature software that is still in its Beta version, so it is still plagued by many problems. Until programs such as this one becomes readily available, the best way to protect ourselves from the embarrassment of having sent unbecoming e-mail will be to take more time rereading what we have typed before we click the Send/Receive button.

What other silly mistakes can we make with our PC? In my case, I sometimes go to bed without double-checking the ongoing activities in my PC. So, there were times I started opening a Web site with a lot of multimedia contents, and because it was taking so long I just forgot about it, turned off the monitor, locked the study and went upstairs to my bedroom. Five minutes later, I would hear loud music coming from downstairs. Certainly none of my neighbors would appreciate such noise at midnight. What happened was that, once the Web site was completely downloaded, the multimedia content started playing.

So, what should we do before we go to bed at night? As my own experience has taught me, we must remember to switch off the computer speakers or at least turn down the volume before hitting the mattress.

By the way, if you want to have your e-mail messages read for you, you can try out Talking E-mail 4.0 for free for 14 days. The program can be downloaded from 4Developers LLC. (4dev.com) If you like it and want to continue using it, you will have to pay US$19.95. Not too bad for a feature-rich program. It will connect to your e-mail server and check your mailbox. If it finds a new message, the program will download it and read it aloud for you. Because it does not erase the messages on the mail server, you can still download them later using your default e-mail client program such as Outlook Express or Eudora.

But, once again, do not forget to check your speakers before you go to bed. You certainly do not want to wake your neighbors up and have them listen to your e-mail being read at 2:30 in the morning!