You Can Get Google to Unsend an Email — if You're Goldman Sachs

Image: Richard Drew/Associated Press

Ever wish you could take back an email that you sent by mistake? If you're Goldman Sachs and you have enough lawyers, you can convince Google to help you.

Google is preventing a Gmail user from accessing an email that a Goldman Sachs employee mistakenly sent with sensitive client information, Goldman said Thursday.

The initial incident occurred on June 23 when a contractor at Goldman Sachs accidentally sent an email to the domain @gmail.com instead of @gs.com, exposing a client's confidential account information to a random Gmail user, according to Reuters.

The bank then filed an apparently unprecedented complaint with a New York court asking it to order Google to delete the message 'to avoid the risk of inflicting a needless and massive privacy violation.'

'Google faces little more than the minor inconvenience of intercepting a single email - an email that was indisputably sent in error,' the company said.

Google wound up blocking the email voluntarily, so it doesn't seem that any legal precedent has been set in which courts intervene in requests to remove individual emails.

'Google complied with the court order to block the email,' Goldman spokeswoman Andrea Raphael told Mashable. 'They have told us that the email was not accessed from the time they sent it to the time it was blocked, so no client information was breached.'

The bank did not disclose how many clients were affected, but it is now seeking further legal action.

'We are going through further proceedings with the court to see that the email is deleted,' Raphael said.

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