Erin said:
When using message recall I don't think the recipient should be
alerted that
a message was attempted to be recalled. There is a reason the person
is
recalling the message so why would you alert the recipient that a
message is
being recalled?
If you AND the recipient are not within the same Exchange organization,
it is highly unlikely the recall will work. When not using Exchange,
Outlook will send a special e-mail to the same recipient which attempts
to remove the prior message. However, the recipient must read the
recall message first so that it then exercises its remove of the prior
message. If the recipients sorts their messages from oldest to newest
then they will still read your first message before they later read your
second (recall) message. When you used the recall action, notice that
it says, "Delete UNREAD copies of message" or "Delete UNREAD copies and
replace with a new message". The prior message must be UNREAD (i.e.,
the special recall message must be read BEFORE reading the original
message). Supposedly Outlook will automatically exercise the recall
e-mail without the user having to actually open it (to manually trigger
the delete of the prior message) but this has always been a flaky
operation, plus users often will have read their messages before the
several minutes elapse before Outlook decides to then exercise any
special messages it received. Even if automatically or manually
exercised, the recall message may not work resulting in sending back a
message notifying you of the failure. If you manually exercise the
recall message by opening it then you'll see the prompt regarding the
alert that it is trying to recall (i.e., delete or replace) a message.
Since this is a special message to remove a prior message, it obviously
only works if the recipient is also using Outlook. Can you guarantee
your recipient is using Outlook? Maybe they are using Outlook EXPRESS,
or Thunderbird, or some other e-mail client. What if their e-mail
client doesn't support MIME content within their received messages?
That means your recall won't work. What if they are stripping off
attachments? The MIME type that contains the instructions to remove the
message is an attachment (Content-Disposition:
attachment;filename="winmail.dat"). What if their e-mail client doesn't
support Microsoft's proprietary TNEF format (usually referred to as
Rich-Text Format, or RTF)? The MIME part, which is an attachment, is a
TNEF part (Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat").
Outlook understands TNEF but other e-mail clients probably don't. What
if the recipient reads their e-mails while offline? They receive your
first message, disconnect, your recall message arrives but it is off in
their mail server's mailbox, and they read your first message without
interference because they have not yet received your recall message;
i.e., as said before, they read your first message BEFORE they read your
recall message.
When creating a special e-mail message used as a recall request, the
e-mail looks like:
----------
Subject: Recall: <originalmessage>
Message-ID:
<!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAF0AAAAAAAAAOKG7EAXlEBqhuwgAKypWwgAAbXNwc3QuZGxsAAAAAABOSVRB+b+4AQCqADfZbgAAAEQ6XFVTRVJcbGVlX2hvZHNkb25cT3V0bG9va1xPdXRsb29rLnBzdAAYAAAAAAAAAAOl4H59qehNmYEbbr16eAbCgAAAGAAAAAAAAAADpeB+fanoTZmBG269engGJHojAAAAAAAAAAAAEAAAAHRlc3QgbWVzc2FnZSAjMQA=@yahoo.com>
....
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C51351.F7C72770
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
The sender would like to recall the message, "<originalmessage>".
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C51351.F7C72770
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="winmail.dat"
<encrypted instructions>
------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C51351.F7C72770--
----------
There are so many reasons why the recall won't work and so few
conditions under which it will work that you might as well as discard
this feature altogether. Go read:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=197094
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=235594