Message Recall Success We started discussing the internals of native Exchange message recalling in How Exchange Message Recalling Works. Here we saw that all functionality is implemented at the MS Outlook client. In Microsoft Outlook How To Recall Sent Message' title='In Microsoft Outlook How To Recall Sent Message' />We also went through the most common recall failure reasons. Today we conclude this discussion exposing less known recall failure conditions and other interesting nuggets. If you do not see the Recall This Message command, then probably you do not have an Exchange Server account or you are not using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Step. Locate the message you wish to recall in the Sent Messages list. Doubleclick the message to open it in a new window. Step. Click Actions in the top menu. Find the latest business news on Wall Street, jobs and the economy, the housing market, personal finance and money investments and much more on ABC News. Outlook 2016 Tutorial for Beginners 2017 How To Use Microsoft Outlook on Office 365 Windows 10 Duration 959. Instructor A Morgan 48,246 views. Recalling Foreign Emails Forget It. Recalling emails sent to recipients outside your Exchange Organization will not work. Outlook recall requests are not based on a standard internet protocol. Instead, Exchange specific Rich Text Messages are used. These cannot be easily sent out over the internet. So Exchange applies a conversion that renders the request readable to any SMTP email client, but in doing so it loses all the functionality. Outlook Cached Mode and Personal Folders. In How Exchange Message Recalling Works, I hinted this point when saying At some point the recipients MS Outlook client processes this recall request. Outlook will try to satisfy the request as soon as it discovers that a request was received. Outlook doesnt just process a recall request as soon as it reaches the recipient mailbox. If using Cached Mode or Personal Folders, Outlook discovers a recall request when checking the server mailbox for new messages. If automatic recall processing is enabled, this would be the time when the recall request is processed. On the other hand, if the recipient is directly accessing the server mailbox without Cache Mode, then recipients will see the recall requests sitting in their Inbox for some time. Again recipients are tempted to open the original email before Outlook discovers the recall. Mailbox Rules. Mailbox rules pose another hurdle to successful recalling. Rules are often employed to automatically organize incoming emails into sub folders. Recall processing fails if the original email and the recall message end up deposited to different folders. When the Recall Arrives First. As already discussed recalling makes use of recall request messages sent from the sender to the original recipient list. So we basically have at least two messages, the original email and the recall request message. Now what happens if Outlook processes the recall request before it sees the original email If Outlook is configured to automatically process recalls, the recall will fail immediately and the sender receives a failure notification if requested. You think this is unlikely to happen If that is the case, then I must be very unlucky. I have seen this happening many times. State Farm Insurance Windshield Crack more. I am not sure if this happens more with one Outlook version than another. I can simply say that I reproduced this using Outlook 2. Here is how The recipient Outlook 2. Cached Mode, is configured to automatically process recalls, and is initially closed. I send an email to this recipient and immediately recall it. At this point the recipient, whose Outlook is closed, has both the original email and recall request at his server mailbox. Let me also say in case someone from MS wants to check this that the recipient has no other new messages in his server mailbox. The recipient opens Outlook 2. The recall request is apparently processed first and recalling fails. I went a little bit further with this test. I kept the original email closed at the recipient mailbox and after that the first recall request failed, I submitted a second recall request. This time the request was successfully processed. The original email was deleted and I received a successful recall confirmation. Notifications Lie. As we saw in Recalling Emails from Outlook 2. These notifications will report back whether or not the recall was successfully completed. However we talked of successful and failed recalls without explaining exactly what these terms truly mean. Whereas the meaning of failure holds little surprises, success might not be as sweet as you may think. By success most will think that the original email was deleted, without the recipient reading it. Less technical wishful thinkers may even believe that all copies of their email got destroyed. I hate to spoil the fun but I have to. First of all, client side recalling can never beat the Exchange server side mailbox item retention. Just like any other deleted email, successfully recalled emails may be recovered using the Outlook Recover Deleted Items functionality. This was discussed in Exchange Server 2. The message recall feature in Microsoft Outlook is a userinitiated way of returning emails to the sender. However, this feature only works in certain situations. Native Data Protection Part 1. The same functionality was also available in earlier Exchange releases. In Outlook 2. 00. Tools Recover Deleted Items. In Outlook 2. 01. Folders Recover Deleted Items. The above shows a successfully recalled email available under Recover Deleted Items. Note how both the original email and the recall request itself are listed. Getting the original email back is just a matter of clicking on Recover Selected Items. Ok, many users are not aware of Recover Deleted Items. Even so, Success does not mean the recipient did not read the original email. A recipient could have read the email, maybe even made a copy of it and then marked the email as unread. When the email request comes in, Outlook finds the message is unread and successfully completes the recall. The sender also receives a nice recall success confirmation in this case. Conclusion. Most of our discussion orbited around the fact that Exchange message recalling is implemented at the Outlook client. Unavoidably the Recipient has great control over his own mailbox. Thus he has plenty of opportunity to block recalling. He even has the opportunity to let us believe the recall succeeded and then go back, recover and read the email. Although I am not part of Microsoft, objectively I dont believe this feature was ever intended to conceal errors. At best client side recalling is like an e apology. Unfortunately if you are dealing with strictly confidential, business critical information an apology wont take us far. This is what inspired me to start working on Win. Developer Message Recall, a server side recalling solution that works well with both internal and more importantly with emails addressed to foreign recipients. References. How Exchange Message Recalling Works. Recalling Emails from Outlook 2.