Five seconds to change your mind

Sending a complaint is the step people stall on, and it is easy to see why. Up to that point everything is reversible. Then it is not.

What changed

You get five seconds to cancel. Pressing send on a case - from the Emails tab, the Letters tab, a reply, or a draft Charlie wrote with you - arms a countdown rather than calling the mail server. Cancel it, press Escape, or leave the page, and nothing has gone anywhere: your email is still there when you come back.

Every check that could reject your complaint runs before that countdown starts - placeholders left unfilled, an address that will not accept mail, the acknowledgement. So you will never watch a timer run down and then get an error.

You can see how it arrives. Your complaint lands in their inbox as your name (via NoReply). From you, with your name on it, not from a company they have never heard of. That was already true. You just could not see it, and it turns out to be the thing people worry about most.

Cancel gets the visual weight over “send now”, because someone reaching for that button is having second thoughts and the option they want should be the obvious one.