Sent An Accidental Email? Here’s How To Unsend It On Your iPhone

You’ve probably been there before: sending a quick email reply on your iPhone, only to realize that the reply was either riddled with typos, you didn’t set Reply All, or you set it but didn’t mean to. While most people might think that once you send a reply, the ship has sailed and there’s nothing you can do about it, and in some cases that’s true. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to bring back the email — as long as you set it up first.

The ability to undo sending an email in the Mail app arrived with the iOS 16 update, adding a nice quality of life update to the already solid email client. This feature was far from new, as many third-party apps could already do it, but it was very much welcomed in the Apple app. When enabled, the Mail app will essentially delay sending an email so you can undo it and make any necessary changes.

Here’s how to set up the upload delay feature on your iPhone. For more, don’t miss everything Apple announced at September’s event and how AirPods Pro will soon work as hearing aids.

Before using the “Send” option, please check this first

For this feature to work, you must use the Mail app to send and receive email. Unlike standalone third-party email apps like Gmail, Apple’s built-in Mail app lets you manage all your email accounts in one place, including:

• iCloud
• Microsoft Exchange
• Google
• Peasant
• AOL
• Perspectives

If you want to add an existing email account to the Mail app, open the Settings app and go to Post > Accounts. Here you can add your account, which will then appear in the Mail app.

How to Unsend an Email on iPhone

In the Mail app, go to the inbox of the account you want (tap Mailbox to see all), then compose a new email. Write the email as you normally would—adding the recipient’s email address, subject, body text, and any attachments—then tap the blue button in the upper right corner to send the email.

Once you do this, you should be sent to your inbox. At the bottom of the page you will see the words Undo Send in blue. By default, you only have 10 seconds to press this button to unsend the last email you sent, otherwise it will be irreversibly sent and you will not be able to recover it.

If you hit Undo Sendyou will be taken back to your email where you can fix any errors or add missing attachments and then resend it. You will have 10 seconds to undo the email if there is another error, just like before.

Change the time before an email is rolled back on your iPhone

The way unsend works is that instead of actually sending the email and then receiving it, it simply sets a buffer period between when you hit the send button and when the email is actually sent. The default is 10 seconds, but you can go into the settings to increase this buffer.

In the Settings app, go to Post > Undo Send Delay and then select one of the delay times:

• Off
• 10 seconds (default)
• 20 seconds
• 30 seconds

If you select Disabled, you won’t be able to use the undo send feature in the Mail app.

To learn more, check out whether your iPhone will get Apple Intelligence and whether iOS 18 will bring a handy new feature to Apple Maps.