You Can Unsend an Email 10 Seconds After It's Sent in iOS 16 Mail App

[jhollington]

These 2 posts seem to really tell the key story here. Either the system is delaying the actual "send" for those 10 seconds or perhaps iCloud is being inserted as new "middleman" here: email doesn't send as it does now but gets into a (presumably secure) buffer in iCloud. If you don't unsend it in 10 seconds, iCloud then sends it as if you sent it "as is" now. Can that work? I don't know. It seems that Macs could pass the information to iCloud so that iCloud could actually execute the send for you a few seconds from now.

It's a delayed send. I did a packet capture, and Mail simply holds on to the message for about 10 seconds, after which it sends it on its merry way, just as if there had been no delay at all.

For the sake of 10 seconds, there's probably not much sense in buffering it via iCloud, although that's an interesting idea. However, I imagine Apple doesn't want to deal with the privacy issues, nor take responsibility for holding onto people's email messages in transit.

Why do this? For a reason already shared in this thread: what if you click "send" and immediately sleep your laptop: the email send was the last thing you wanted to do today. If you sleep it before it departed, you would assume a send that didn't actually leave the laptop yet. On the other hand, if iCloud is a new middleman, you still immediately send it out of your laptop and iCloud controls whether it goes in 10 seconds or not based on you clicking unsend or not.

This really shouldn't be a problem for the mere ten seconds it takes to delay the message. Closing the lid of your MacBook doesn't necessarily suspend everything immediately, so all Apple needs to do is ensure that it stays awake long enough for Mail to do its thing.

In fact, even scheduled send is handled entirely by Apple Mail. It sits on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad until the scheduled time. That does mean it may not get sent if your device is off or out of connectivity. Probably not an issue with an iPhone or cellular iPad, but even with a Mac, I imagine Apple is relying on the "Power Nap" feature; Apple Silicon Macs are effectively always on in the background unless you shut them down completely, while older Intel-based Macs can still stay active for a few seconds or wake up from sleep mode to do whatever it is they need to do.

That does mean scheduled messages may not get sent out at the exact minute they're scheduled for, but email has never been a real-time communication method anyway. If your scheduled message goes out a couple of minutes after it's scheduled time, chances are nobody will notice. We're also only dealing with the first beta right now, so Apple may refine some of this down the road.

At this point, I'm more annoyed that the Send Later and Remind Me folders don't sync between devices — even if you're using an iCloud account. If you schedule an email on your iPhone, that's only reflected on your iPhone — it won't appear on any of your other devices until it's actually sent. Snoozed messages similarly go into an entirely local "Remind Me" folder, and they don't actually disappear from the Inbox on the IMAP server, which means that a "snoozed" message on your iPhone will still be sitting there in the inbox on your Mac. I'm chalking this up to things not being fully baked in the first beta, and I imagine Apple will find some way to sync these details via iCloud, even if the actual messages are only stored locally.

 

[jhollington]

Does unsend work with all email services in Mail or just iCloud mail?

It works with any account since Apple is simply waiting ten seconds after you hit the "Send" button before it actually transmits the message to your account's outbound (SMTP) mail server.

 

[dk001]

Google used to support push by letting users configure their accounts with Exchange ActiveSync, which was a totally different protocol designed for use with Exchange Servers. Google called this Google Sync and it's still technically available for Google Workspace customers, although Google is trying to encourage organizations to move away from it.

Due to the way Exchange ActiveSync works, Google Sync always had some odd limitations that made it a tradeoff between configuring your account via a standard IMAP connection and losing push notifications. For instance, drafts and starred/flagged messages wouldn't sync over Google Sync. I went back and forth a few times over the years, but ultimately decided the idiosyncracies weren't worth it just to get push email.


It depends on what you call "Push IMAP." Apple supports IMAP IDLE in the Apple Mail on the Mac, but it's never supported this in iOS due to the complexities of battery life and changing networks.

From the very beginning, Apple Mail on the iPhone and iPad has only supported Apple's own push email technology, which is based on the APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) framework used by every iOS app that wants to use push notifications. It still works with iCloud, and I think Yahoo may even still support it. Fastmail also specifically added support for Apple's push email features in 2015, and it still works great. I'd been using Fastmail off and on for years, but that's when I permanently switched over, and I haven't looked back since.

Thanks for the explanation.
I remember having Push for Gmail in Apple Mail (iOS) a while back. Don't know when it went away.
I use Mail for iCloud pretty much only these days.

 

[Cogsworth]

Undo send is great but all I really want is “return to inbox after delete”, push for Gmail and maybe an option to open web pages in-app.

 

[Jay Bly]

With the delay send feature, is there a way to change pre determined 9pm send times.