Have you ever sent an email and realised you sent it to the wrong person or spotted a spelling error too late?

Don’t worry, that feeling of dread is common.

A 2008 AOL survey found that 32 per cent of respondents had accidentally sent an email to the wrong person. In a more recent survey, that number rose to 79 per cent.

How can I unsend an email?

You can unsend an email but only on Gmail and Outlook accounts.

To recall messages from an Outlook account, enable the “delete unread copies of this message“.

To unsend an email from a Gmail account, click the ‘undo send’ button. To turn on that button, follow these easy steps:

• Open Gmail and click the top right ‘settings’ button
• Make sure your tab is in ‘general’
• Click enable undo send
• Select your preferred cancellation period and save preferences
• Now, after you have sent an email, a yellow rectangular box will appear saying “Your message has been sent. Undo”
• Click the undo button. Now you can edit your email and resend.

How can I unsend a Facebook message?

You can’t but according to TechCrunch, Facebook plans to make an ‘unsend’ feature available to users in several months.

This is after reports that Facebook was using a secret tool to allow CEO Mark Zuckerberg to unsend messages from the inboxes of users without warning.

Facebook already offers a secret encrypted messaging feature. This includes an unsend expiration timer but can only be used in a secret conversation.

However, Mr Zuckerberg did not use the secret encrypted conversation feature to unsend his messages. He was able to do this to his permanent Facebook inbox but this feature is not available to the public as of yet.

Until they make this tool available to everyone, Facebook has said they won’t unsend any more messages.

“We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages.”

How do I start a secret conversation on Facebook?

• In messenger, tap the ‘compose message’ button on the top right corner
• Tap ‘secret’ that is situated to the right
• Select who you want to message
• Click the timer button in the text box and set the a time for the message to disappear

The secret messaging feature allows a timer to be set for your messages to disappear on Facebook. Photo: TechCrunch