I agree (again, personal stance - Lotus 911 of course provides support for this feature). The rare occasions prior to R8 when users specifically asked me if recall was available were not situations where they accidentally sent a message without remembering to include an attachment, or forgot to include some pertinent information, etc.... it was always a case where they had accidentally sent information to someone who, for whatever reason, should not have received it. In other words, they exercised inadequate care in ensuring that they were not inappropriately disclosing confidential information: they'd sent one customer's data to a different customer, or proprietary data to a competitor, etc. - put yet another way, it was a policy violation that could, in fact, be grounds for termination. While I can see value in allowing an administrator to protect his employer's strategic advantage by mitigating the damage once such a disclosure has been identified, informing actual end users that a recall feature exists erodes their sense of how crucial it is to comply with any policies in place regarding confidentiality: it promises false hope that, no matter how aggregious their violation of such policies, they can "get away with" accidental violation - or even poor judgment - with a click of a button. As you mentioned, numerous factors may prevent this feature from functioning as desired, which is yet another reason why it is so crucial to ensure confidential information is being sent only to appropriate recipients *before* it is sent, not after.

There's nothing like sending a recall message to tell me that you just sent me some juicy inappropriate or proprietary content!

Mail routing happens pretty much instantaneously these days, so all a person has to do is use their Blackberry or other mobile device to move/copy the original before the system can process the recall request.

While I personally disagree with the feature, most of my clients going to 8 ask for this, most of them with the management response of "oh yeah, that's in Outlook".

What I try to convey to those clients, is that having this feature should in fact not change the way they have done collaboration thus far, as ens users will STILL need to use common sense (wha?) and due dilligence when sending out communication.

The goal with message recall being that you never have to use it again.

That way of thinking also comes in handy when such message has already gone out on a handheld device.

While I agree with you, I can't tell you how many time our customers have called and asked if there was any way for our product to 'recall' a message. I wish I had a $ for every time an executive or someone else sent out a message they wish they hadn't. Some have been quite funny, while others not so funny.

We have it turned with restrictions(8 hours, unread only) and we also reminded the users of the limitations. It wasn't as big deal as I thought it would be. I always couched it as "always stop and think before you send, but in that one case here is this tool. "

Side note: Actually mail recall is possible with the USPS. Someone once mentioned it to me. Here is the actual form: { Link }

Those who need the ability to recall sent email lack the intellectual capacity to use email in the first place, and should be denied access to such.

Exchange offers no way to disable message recall, it is always on, which in today's world of litigation, FRCP, edisscovery, and lawyers essentially owning large, corporate mail systems data, is a major downside of exchange. Lawyers cringe when they hear people can retract an electronic message, it screws up discovery and would broaden the scope of discovery, (more $$) we were mandated not to enable it in domaino 8.