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How to recall an email in Outlook (and why it often doesn't work)
Recall pulls a sent email back out of the recipient's mailbox before, or sometimes after, they read it. It only works between Microsoft 365 work or school mailboxes in the same organisation. If you sent the message to a personal address, a Gmail address or anyone outside your organisation, recall can't reach it and the message stays where it is. This guide covers Outlook on the web and the new Outlook app, which share the same layout.
What you'll need: A Microsoft 365 work or school account. Personal outlook.com, hotmail.com and live.com accounts don't have recall at all. A desktop or laptop browser, or the new Outlook app for Windows or Mac.
Open Outlook
Go to outlook.office.com in your browser and sign in with your work or school account, or open the new Outlook app.
Open the Sent Items folder
In the folder list on the left, click Sent Items.
Open the message you want to recall
Double-click the message so it opens in its own window. Selecting it in the reading pane is sometimes enough, but opening it fully is the reliable way to get the recall option to appear.
Open the More actions menu
Click the three dots (More actions) at the top-right of the message.
Choose Recall message
Click Advanced actions, then Recall message. In the new Outlook app for Windows the same command may also sit on the Message tab of the ribbon as Recall.
Confirm the recall
Click OK in the confirmation box. Outlook now attempts to delete the message from each recipient's mailbox. There's no option to replace it with a corrected version here — that only exists in classic Outlook for Windows.
Read the Message Recall Report
Within a few minutes an email with the subject Message Recall Report arrives in your inbox. Click the link inside it to open the report in your browser. Each recipient is listed as succeeded, pending or failed.
Send a corrected message if you need to
Recall only deletes. If the original needed fixing rather than withdrawing, write and send a new email with the correction.
Variations
Open the message from Sent Items, click File, then Message Resend and Recall, then Recall This Message. The classic app offers two choices: Delete unread copies of this message, or Delete unread copies and replace with a new message. The replace option opens the original so you can edit it and send it again.
Recall only appears when the sent message is in your own Sent Items. Mail sent from a shared mailbox through Outlook on the web is usually stored in the shared mailbox's Sent Items, where the recall option is greyed out or absent. Classic Outlook for Windows stores the same message in your personal Sent Items, so recall works from there.
Microsoft's documentation disagrees with itself on whether recall is available in the Outlook app for iPhone and Android. If you're on your phone, open outlook.office.com in the phone's browser and follow the steps above rather than hunting for the option in the app.
Troubleshooting
One of these applies: you're signed in to a personal Microsoft account rather than a work or school one; the message is in a shared mailbox's Sent Items; your organisation's administrator has switched recall off; or the message is older than your organisation's recall limit, which is set by the administrator and defaults to a year.
The commonest cause is a recipient outside your organisation — recall can't touch mailboxes it doesn't control. It also fails if the recipient already opened the message and your organisation doesn't allow read messages to be recalled, if the recipient's mailbox runs on an on-premises Exchange server rather than Microsoft 365, or if an inbox rule already moved or forwarded the message.
Nothing can retrieve it once it has left Microsoft 365. The only protection for this case is Undo send, which holds every message for a few seconds before sending. Turn it on under Settings › Mail › Compose and reply › Undo send, where you can set the delay to up to 10 seconds. It only helps with messages sent after you switch it on.
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