recalled

There are a lot of settings in Microsoft Office that I do not fully understand, but probably the one that perplexes me the most is the recall functionality. On rare occasion, and typically when the email is sent to a large number of people, I will get an email followed by a recall request from some random person. Either someone wrote something they regret or they passed along inaccurate information.

The problem is that as soon as I get a notification that someone wants to recall an email, I get really curious about why the email is being recalled. I typically check the old email to see what in it to cause the author to want to recall it. All the recall request does is draw attention to the errant email.

The uselessness of the recall functionality was on display in the news in the past week. Apparently, a Congressional clerical worker sent an email to a whistleblower distribution list for Justice Department employees with and placed the list in the "To" field rather than the "BCC" field. This was the distribution list for people who had submitted complaints to a whistleblower website. This way, everyone who had submitted a complaint on the whistleblower website saw the email address of everyone else who submitted a complaint on that website. The person who made the error tried to recall the email, but all this succeeded in doing was to resend everyone's email address to the distribution list.

From my perspective, a better process to follow when you realize that you shouldn't have sent a specific email is just to reply to the bad email to correct what was wrong with the first email. What is so difficult about that?