Hastily-written emails can be damaging to both your reputation and your pride, but Gmail's latest feature has thrown users a lifeline, Digital Spy reports.

Google has made Undo Send an official feature of its email service, moving it from the confines of the labs menu to the mainstream.

Undo Send lets users recall a message up to 30 seconds after they've hit send, so there's no reason to look so aghast the next time you message the wrong person.

The feature can be activated from within the General tab of the settings menu, with users able to give themselves either five, ten, 20 or 30 seconds to recall an email.

Despite its name, Undo Send does not actually undo the sending process, it merely delays a message from reaching its recipient to give the user the chance to cancel.

Undo Send has existed for some time as an experimental feature, housed in the labs menu of Gmail.