Recall, Unsend and Retract Sent Email in IBM Lotus Notes/Domino with Fetch Retriever

Legacy enterprise email system such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise and IBM Officevision or Profs (Professional Office System) has the functionality and feature that allows users to have the ability to recall or retract emails that has been sent so that it’s ‘unsent’. However, Lotus Notes or Lotus Domino from IBM does not has the email retraction capability. So if you just migrated to Lotus Notes/Domino platform and getting used the email recalling or unsending email or undo sending email feature in your old system, you may not accustomed to the new mail architecture, especially if you have sent the wrong email to wrong recipients or distribution lists, or you mistakenly send confidential information or obscene materials.

Email recalling or email retraction works in such as way that when sender initiates, the system will try to delete the emails (normally only those still remain unread and reside on the same email system) that have been delivered to many recipients’ mailboxes or inboxes automatically without any configuration needed, or effort to clean up the unwanted emails. For what reason it’s not included in Lotus Domino and Notes platform is unclear, but most likely it’s due to the complexity of Lotus Notes mail system that designed as distributed mail system with multiple repositories, on multiple servers, with the ability to work offline. However, if you think that email retraction and recalling function is a must have for your corporate, there is a third-party solution.

metaLogic develops Fetch Retriever that provides users and administrators with the ability to instantly unsent email, recall email that was sent in error or anger, regardless of origin. Fetch Retriever works as a server side task, built on the principle of tracking real read/unread message state in the complex domino environment. Email is tracked without having to change email templates or have awkward workarounds (e.g., tracking if a message was replicated offline).

Features of Fetch Retriever include:

1. Distributed, real-time retraction.
2. No sent view dependency, email can be removed from the sender’s sent view, or from a recipient’s inbox.
3. Track read and unread state of each email to enforce policy of allowing or disallowing retraction of read email.
4. Web client support to recall message.
5. Stub messages for removed email.
6. Blackberry support.

Fetch Retrieve is available from IBM Collaboration Solutions Catalog.