Is it really possible? Yes it is.
Now of course, you’re probably sitting at your computer or tablet dumbfounded or simply in disbelief, but it’s possible. Let me explain.
Before we start, I do have to tell you this: you can’t write text in an email, send it, and change it 5 minutes later. Thats for sure. Even though Gmail has a Labs feature where you can “undo sending” of an email, it’s not actually like that (the plugin works by delaying sending by 5 seconds while showing an Undo Send link).
Then I’m just joking about this whole email thing right?
Wrong.
The changing of sent emails involves absolutely no hacking, no time travel, and no cunning email sending delay ruses. No, it’s all about creativity.
Think about what happens when you upload a picture to the internet, either on a site like imgur.com or your own public FTP server. Now you can share that image by sending people the link, or embedding it in some content such as an email.
When you embed that image and the client opens the email, what happens in a nutshell is that the image is download from the file server or website, and displayed to the client. Because the image is a server-side image, any subsequent changes made to the image will affect what the user sees.
That right there, is precisely how to change an email after you send it. All you have to do is:
- Create an image with the content that you wish to include in the email
- Save and upload the image to a publicly accessible Internet location
- EMBED the image into the email. It’s important to embed and not attach; these are two different things. If you attach the image, the image is now on the client-side, and you will not be able to (without hacking), change that image!
- Send the email!
Any time that you need to make corrections to the message, just edit the image with the appropriate corrections. If you do this before your client checks their email, they will never know that you made an error in the first place.
The implications of changing emails post-sending are huge. Just the other day, I met a gentleman on the bus home who worked as a web designer, photographer, and graphic designer. He told me the following (paraphrased):
As a web designer, you get the blame for everything, even if it’s not your fault. If something goes wrong, it’s still your fault. That’s why I make sure that everything I do is free of mistakes and errors.
There was this one time where I was in charge of sending out an event invitation to 5000 clients. My co-workers gave me all the information, my job was to put all the information together as an event invite, and send it out.
After I had completed a final version of the invitation, I sent it out to my co-workers and boss. Everyone said it looked good, and gave me the green light to send out the invitations. So I went to my office, clicked “send”, and bam, it was out.
But after a minute, our manager walks in and tells me that “we have a huge problem.” What was it, I asked? “You know that event invitation you sent out? I just received a copy of it, and the time is wrong, the date is wrong, the speaker’s name is spelled incorrectly, and the place has changed.”
Game over right? Would he get all the blame and lose his job? No. Look what he does next:
I said to her, “just give me one minute, let me fix this.” Of course, she didn’t believe that it would only take a minute to fix a wrong email sent out to 5000 clients, but I reassured her. I went back to my office, opened up the image, edited the time, date, location, and speaker’s name, and saved the corrections. And there you go, 5000 emails, all updated with the correct information. My manager was simply stunned.
You see, all he had to do was embed that image into the mass email, and as soon as he found a mistake, he edited the image and reuploaded it to the company’s file server. With that, almost all of his clients had no idea that there was a huge mistake in the first place.
Then again, writing all your emails as images, embedding them, and sending them is usually impractical. For most forms of daily email, it is perfectly acceptable to send a second email if anything in the original email is errant.
But for something as important as a huge event for 5000 clients, embedding an image to change later is not a bad idea at all.