How to recall an email in Lotus 6.5?

July 14, 2005 6:40 AM

Is there any way to recall an email in Lotus Notes?

I just hit "send" on a Lotus Notes email with a 4MB movie clip attached to it. Nothing inappropriate, but I didn't realize our corporate office was in the cc: list until it was too late. I panicked a bit and shut the power off, hopefully before it could upload the file. When I turned the computer back on, I deleted the file that I was uploading and emptied the recycle bin. I think I probably got it before it could be uploaded, but I'm worried about the next time I open Lotus. It's not particularly helpful usually, but knowing my luck it caches everything in the event there's a power failure. So, my question is, did I catch it in time and if I didn't, is there any way to keep it from sending or recalling it?

posted by electroboy to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Uh - if it all got to the server, then you (as a user) are a bit stuffed. I don't think that it will attempt to re-send it when you open Notes again - but IANANA...

You should have contacted your Notes Admin bod immediately, and they can stop it before it gets anywhere. Fess up! Most people make mistakes - in our place, it's usually a high-level manager/director abusing the "Reply to All With History" option... d'oh!

For future reference, you can control-break the send process if you're fast enough - while the little lightning bolt is flashing away in the status bar...
posted by Chunder at 7:09 AM on July 14, 2005

This is also a useful reason for working on local replicas in Lotus Notes. If you send mail and it hasn't replicated to the server yet, you can still delete it from your outgoing mailbox.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:11 AM on July 14, 2005

There are some third-party applications out there that let Notes do this. But they have to be installed on the server, and require modification of the mail template and server's mail.box file. Outside of running from a local replica, there's nothing available for the average user.
posted by Eddie Mars at 9:26 AM on July 14, 2005

Crisis averted. Looks like panicking and turning the power off worked, but thanks for the suggestions. I'm using the local mailbox that's uploaded to the server periodically from now on.
posted by electroboy at 11:24 AM on July 14, 2005