You’re using Gmail wrong – clever hack is a must-know for anyone sending emails

IF YOU'RE using Gmail, there's an important hack that you need to know.

Anyone who sends emails on a regular basis will have regretted the odd missive.

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Thankfully, Gmail has had a feature that lets you unsend emails for years.

It could save you in a tricky situation.

The feature works by delaying your message actually sending out.

Adding just a few seconds on to the time it takes for an email to be pushed isn't hugely problematic for most users.

But it could avoid some serious embarrassment by having the feature active – so the trade-off is a no-brainer.

How to unsend a Gmail message

To use this clever feature, you need to manually enable it in settings.

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First, log in to your Gmail account.

Then go into Settings – this is via the cogwheel in the top-right corner of your screen.

Choose Settings inside that menu, and you'll see loads of detailed options for your account.

Now you want to tick the box next to Enable Undo Send.

Once that's done, you can adjust how long the grace period is for you to unsend a message.

You can select anything from five to 30 seconds.

Now scroll to the bottom and save your new settings.

When you send an email in future, you'll see a small pop-up box appear.

This will give you the option to unsend your message – if you're still within the grace period.

Click it and the message won't actually be "unsent" – instead, it's actually never sent in the first place.

But if you're mulling over your decision, be quick: once the pop-up disappears, you can no longer unsend the message.

Gmail does have an email recall option, but it relies on the other person agreeing – which makes it largely pointless for avoiding embarrassment.

And avoiding embarrassment on Gmail is important, as the TikTok video from below points out...

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