I doubt there are many of us in business who have never inadvertently sent an e-mail to the wrong person … or sent a message before it was fully complete … or forgot to include an attachment.

In such cases, it would be so nice to be able to recall the e-mail — just like we used to do in the days of postal mail simply by retrieving the letter from the outgoing mail bin.

Recent news reports reveal that this capability is actually a reality now.

A start-up firm called Criptext has just raised a half-million dollars in private investment funds to help it perfect and expand a product that allows any sent e-mail to be recalled — even if the recipient has already opened and read it.

According to a report from Business Insider, Criptext is currently available as a plugin and a browser extension for the popular Outlook and Gmail email services.  It operates inside of the email, enabling the sender to track when, where and who has opened emails and/or downloaded attachments within them.

In addition, Criptext also enables the sender to recall emails, and even to set a self-destruct timer to automatically recall emails after a specified length of time.

Viewing a screenshot of how Criptext works (in this case with the Gmail service), things look pretty simple (and pretty cool, too):

I thought it would be only a matter of time before some developer would figure out a way to “unwind” an email communiqué once the “send” button was hit.  And now we have it.

Of course, time will tell whether Criptext can live up to its billing … or if it turns out to be more of a nightmare of glitches than a dream come true.

It would be great to hear from anyone who may have first-hand experience with Criptext — or other similar email functionalities.  Please share your experiences and perspectives pro or con with other readers here.