91: Recall emails

Outlook has a function called “Recall”. When a sender sent a wrong email to recipient A and if he does not wish A to read the email, he could send a recall for that specific email. Then when A open Outlook, he would see the original email and one recall message. When he double click the recall message, the original email would automatically be permanently deleted and he cannot see what the sender has written and wrongly sent to him.

All people have curiosity and would want to see what someone has done wrongly. But this function of Outlook seems cannot deter people’s curiosity. If we delete the Recall message from the Inbox, we can still see the wrong email. Or if we don’t double click the Recall message but just click once (means the Recall message is not opened), we can still see the wrong email. So the Recall function seems useless.

Although it is useless in deterring the recipient from reading the email, it showed the intention of the sender. The Recall message is just like saying sorry to the recipient, but not expressedly conveyed.

This intention is important and should be easily felt by the subject person. If you have a brilliant idea to express this intention but it is too sophisticated for the person to understand, it is still useless. Brilliant ideas should be for well-understood persons only, otherwise will bring about unpredictable misunderstanding..

In some occasions, less expressed words of sorry are preferred to an explicit one. Directly saying sorry seems less sincere in the sense that it can be run out of the lips directly and without contemplation. A more different means of sorry showed the more willingness to apologize and offering meaningful remedies is definitely more practical than merely say hundred times sorry. Actions usually speak louder than words if one is sincere enough.