Exchange Message Recalls

Exchange 2000/2003 offers a Message Recall functionality for when you have sent an email a little too hastily. Maybe the information containing within proved incorrect and needs to be updated, or perhaps sensitive data was sent to the wrong person. When this happens here is how to use Message Recalls and what you can and cannot expect from the service.

To recall a message, navigate to your Sent Items folder and locate the message you wish to recall. Open the message, and in the Toolbar select Actions and then choose Recall This Message. You will then see a dialogue box with a couple of additional options, whether or not to delete the recalled message or to delete & replace with a message, and if you want a notification of the recall's success or failure. The former option will depend on the individual case, but for the latter you'll probably like to see the notification any time you attempt a recall.

There are several factors that will determine the success or failure of Message Recall.

• Messages sent outside the Exchange enviroment (ie, to POP users) cannot be recalled.
  
  
• Messages that have been read cannot be recalled, by design. Microsoft decided that allowing messages that have already been read to be recalled would give users a false sense of security. Once read, the message could have been printed, forwarded to other people, or copy/pasted into other documents. By letting the user know the recall failed, it drives home the point that the information has indeed propagated and other steps will need to be taken to restrict further information flow.
  
  
• If the recipient has Tracking Options, Process requests and responses on arrival enabled, incoming messages are treated as "read" and cannot be recalled.
  
  
• If the recipient has Outlook Rules in place that move the message from the Inbox to another folder, the message cannot be recalled. Recalls only function on messages located within the top-level Inbox folder.
  
  
• The Reading Pane does not count as "read". This is a two-edged sword - it prevents open but unwatched Outlook instances from blocking all possible Recall attempts just because the focus is on the first email in the Inbox, but it does mean that the recipient could have read at least part of an "unread" message that appeared in the Reading Pane.

It is not the policy of the Virginia Tech Mail Team to manually retrieve/delete messages which Message Recall fails to recover. Always double-check your messages for correct information (recipient address, correct attachments, etc) before hitting Send. The surest way to prevent sensitive data from escaping is before the fact!