How to turn on 'Undo Send' in Gmail

There are no second chances in life, but there may be in email.

While this is of little consolation to those wishing they could hit "undo" on semi-recent national events, Gmail's Undo Send feature gives us all the break we so desperately need.

Are you using it? You really should be.

Email, after all, is deceptively hard. Reaching inbox zero is basically a pipe dream, and crafting the perfect message that isn't riddled with typos is an increasingly difficult task as the distractions provided by Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/looming WWIII all pile up.

How many times have you hit "send" on a professional email only to immediately realize you've misspelled the recipient's name? Or sent out a message to millions of people asking them how much they hate CNN?

With just a little tweak of the Gmail settings, no one need know about these embarrassing mistakes. Because that's right, you can actually take an email back. Sort of.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The feature rolled out to the general public in 2015, and allows people with a Gmail account to set a window of time — either 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds — during which the sender can quickly retract a decision to fire off any particularly ill-conceived company-wide emails.

The SUPER IMPORTANT PART is that you have to turn the feature on before you send that questionable email. So all of you that just cathartically pounded out "I quit" messages hoping to quickly undo them are out of luck.

Thankfully, turning the feature on is incredibly simple. Log into your Gmail account, click on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and select Settings. Next, scroll down to the check box labeled "Enable Undo Send" and select it. You can then choose a "send cancellation period" of the aforementioned 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds.

Lastly, scroll down and click "save changes." Don't forget this part.

The next time you scribble off a missive and toss it into the digital void you'll have the chance to pull it back in all its typo-ridden glory. With Undo Send enabled, you sleep better at night knowing your email has a fail-safe -- even if the rest of the world is a terrible mess.