How do I stop Outlook from continuing to try to recall a message?

May 20, 2006 12:10 AM

Outlook question: I tried to recall a message, and now every day I get 30 or so e-mails telling me that the recall effort failed. How do I stop these 'failed recall' e-mails? (the message was re-called to correct a typo and in any case has been obe'd, i.e., "overtaken by events"). Thanks.
posted by tesseract420 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Are you using Outlook with an Exchange server? If so, how many recipients were on the original message? It's likely that you will get a "failed to recall" for every recipient that opens your message (using Exchange, recipients get to decide whether or not to respect recalls from non-admins).
posted by Dunwitty at 12:40 AM on May 20, 2006

Response by poster: There was just one addressee who is not in the company, i.e. an outside addressee. I do not know whether we use exchange server or not, my guess is that we do.
posted by tesseract420 at 2:24 AM on May 20, 2006

here was just one addressee who is not in the company

Yeah, but how many within the company? Dunwitty has it right, you'll get 'failed' message from everybody that has already opened it. No offense, but recalls are as dumb as read receipts.
posted by fixedgear at 4:11 AM on May 20, 2006

Response by poster: There was only one addressee. He was not inside the company, so it's not an issue with local addresses.
Whether dumb or not, I am simply trying to stop 25 emails per day telling me that the recall failed.
There are times when read receipts are useful, especially in legal contexts.
posted by tesseract420 at 9:42 AM on May 20, 2006

Contact your IT crew. The message is probably stuck in a queue and the server is retrying every x hours. They can delete it if you tell them the email address you attempted to recall from.
It will probably stop at some point, but if the server is misconfigured it could take a while.
posted by disclaimer at 2:19 PM on May 20, 2006