Message recall function in Outlook doesn’t work with any normal condition. It requires a few things in place:
1) Senders and Recipients must be on Exchange Server environment
2) Senders and Recipients must have Outlook 2003-2010 that supports message recall
3) Senders and Recipients must have Outlook opened or running in the background when message was sent/received.
Therefore,we can conclude that at this point, message recall is only useful for internal organization message recalls especially for people who are more desk-bound, as message recall will run successfully on the sender if Outlook is opened on the recipient side.
A little weird, but it’s true.
More info:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/how-message-recall-works-HA001091760.aspx
