I use this in a project I'm working on. The comment and post delete buttons turn into deactivatable countdowns when pressed, so if you misclick you can click again to prevent the transaction. So far people have responded positively, but your mileage may vary.

That's a really neat solution to where to put the countdowns.

The delayed email sending is exactly what Gmail's 'Undo Send' labs feature does. It's really useful.

Yes, the best way to deal with irrevocable actions is ... to make them as revocable as possible. Switching from deleting files to putting them in the trash is a classic example.

No, a versioned filesystem is the classic example. Once you empty trash, those files are gone forever. When you delete a file from a versioned store, it's only gone until you remember you want it again.

I much prefer a filesystem where I can actually delete things (including shredding it).

Funny thing is, I was aware of the feature, but had incorrectly assumed how it works. My assumption was that the feature was only available in-network (to other Gmail addresses) and actually recalled the message from the server, so long as the recipient hadn't logged in and seen it already.

After reading the Gmail blog entry on it, I'd call it an invisible delayed passive confirmation, since Gmail labels it "undo" rather than "cancel." Makes perfect sense, though.

Yes! I've been using that feature for quite a while now, and as far as I'm concerned it has completely solved the accidental sending problem. And even better, it does so in a way that seems perfectly intuitive and consistent with the rest of the Gmail interface.

The e-mail queue reminds me of my days at the college radio station, where the output of the broadcast booth passed through a 5-second delay before going out to the transmitter. That way, if something "bad" happened (f'rinstance, a caller dropped the f-bomb), you could dump the delay before it went out over the airwaves.

Thinking about it more, I'm a little surprised that this hasn't made its way into standard e-mail clients, at least as a feature.

In gmail it did: the "friday night you are drunk and shouldn't send this email" feature.

I love this idea, confirmation dialogs are the bane of ui design, and having undo is much much better than asking "are you sure" all the time, but for irreversable actions not much has been done.

the mockup looks good too

The final email suggestion is a lot like gmail labs' "undo send" feature [1]. It allows you to 'undo' sending an email by not sending it for five seconds.

[1] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send....

I've had a friend with an iPhone how to cancel sending an email - she's inadvertently hit the send button presumably several times when composing an email there.

Having a "sending in 10 seconds" option may well be useful in her case.

In my case I sometimes squeeze out an email at a subway station just before my connection cuts off as we head on to the next station.