This type of rule can also be used to give you a safety net of being able to change your mind after clicking "Send". See this article for details.

TechHit

No this is an amazing tip! I read this on a different blog many months ago...but it's ABSOLUTELY necessary if you work in an office environment!

It's a life saver when you press the Send button in Outlook when you didn't want to send that message! Either you wrote something that you would regret later on or it was to the completely wrong person.

Definitely something I have done several times!

akishore

Yeah, but the person who gets the message still sees the time you actually wrote it when you do the "do not deliver before" option. I learned this because I was writing an email to a coworker at 2 AM and I didn't want him to realize I was up at such a crazy hour, so I set it to deliver at 7, but he could still see that I wrote it at 2 AM.

anniekate76

Excellent! I send an email out every Monday to co-workers that this will help with!

wickedcupofjoe

Watch out with this - the timestamping gets a bit dicey, as Annie noted.

To test this I composed a deferred email at 4:00pm, set my local clock to 5:00, deferred the email to 5:30, and hit send and set my system clock back to normal.

I copied the email to myself, a coworker on the same mailserver and my gmail account.

Different timestamps all over the place - my sent timestamp, his received timestamp, gmail's timestamp, etc.

I am not completely sold on this.

razordu30

@anniekate76: Good point, I ran into the same problems when I was using Outlook/Exchange at a previous job!

I used this tip primarily to batch send a set of weekly emails for an entire semester at once...but if the recipients don't keep their inboxes clean, the "new" message that got delivered today would show as sent 3 months ago, and they never saw it!

Any way to have Outlook change the "sent" date/time to when it's actually sent, and not when it's placed into the outbox?

mtaylor924

I'm not sure why anyone would care when you sent an email, but this is a great tip for those times you accidentally hit send.

But if someone sends me an email at 2am or 6pm, I'm still going to read it when I read it... and why would I care when they sent it?

downstairs

This is a great help! Now I don't have to send secondary updates to my prof when new data/insights come in 5 minutes after I shoot off a big update. Thanks LH! (Or well, uh, Gina I mean ;-)

kureshii

I set up a one minute "think about it" delay when sending mail. It lets me 1) take back something sent out of anger or spite, and 2) remember to attach the attachment (saves embarrassment)

chrissv

Unfortunately, for all those who want to pull a Costanza and compose an email at 4 PM but have it send at 2 AM, you have to keep Outlook running. Won't work if you've logged off at 4 PM.

OX4

I actually don't like this tip - but realize the importance, which is why I do something different:

I set Tools->Send Receieve->Send and Receieve Settings->Send & Receieve Groups.

From here I made two groups of groups - one group that runs every 5 minutes and gets my mail from all my accounts.

The other group runs every 15 minutes (just a number I picked) and Sends all my mail.

The advantage over the posted method: When I'm working with a friend on a project sitting next to me and I just want to mail him our project, I don't want to either wait 30 minutes or have to flag the email important. If I started doing that, people would start to lose the respect for the "IMPORTANT OMG!" flag next to messages from me.

This method lets me have a random amount of time delay (sometimes it'll wait 15 minutes before sending, sometimes I may get 2 minutes before sending... one time it sent a few seconds later (because I was close to that 15 minute window closing)) that I can override without effecting my receipient - I just hit "Send/Receieve All" on my toolbar and all my mail sends.

The disadvantage is stated above: Every now and then you don't get a lot of time before it sends - but generally when I realize I make a mistake, I realize it in a few seconds after hitting send and can fix it. This gives me those seconds almost always. Because it's an even 15 minutes, I also have conditioned myself to never hit send right around :15, :30, :45, or :00 - so that fixes that.

Hope that helps people who found the posted method a bit harsh to always have to wait 30 minutes!

Matt

MonoNexo

@joelena:

If you make a keyword in the subject, body, or change the sensitivity, you're just making more work every time you want to send email. This method says that you generally get an amount of time that your email will wait - or - after you've already hit send, you can just hit "Send & Receieve All" on the toolbar and your mail will send...

With the first method in this article, the only way to change your mind after you hit send on whether you want an email to wait or to send immediately is to click on your Outbox, open the email, change something (in this case, the priority), and then hit send again - and then it will send.

Matt

MonoNexo

I follow the three minute send rule.. it works really well. I wish it could be much easier to set up in Outlook though, for instance, "Tick Box to defer email sending by 5 minutes"

Like other commentators have said.. no follow ons with attachments!

It also prevents those one line emails.. thats what IM is for!

jezza

@MonoNexo: That actually sounds like more of a hassle. If you want an easy way to send it now, why would you still make yourself wait up to 15 minutes? Flagging it as "Important" is not the only way to get an exception. Why not just use a keyword in the subject, or a keyword the body, or mark it as Sensitivity="Personal"?

In Outlook 2007, the simplest option would be to set a category called "Immediate" to be your exception (I'm not sure if a category can be an exception in Outlook 2003, since I don't have it).

joelena

yeah i tried to run the rules and my IT guy removed it from outlook!

control freaks!

tech9lab

@OX4: That's true if you are running Outlook with IMAP or POP email.

But if your Outlook is connected to an Exchange server, the server will still send the email after you close Outlook. In that scenario, nothing is cached locally - Outlook is just a tool for manipulating data on the server, so it doesn't matter if Outlook is open or closed.

mtaylor924

+ Watch video

As some others have said, this is great for "sender's remorse." I have a rule that automatically delays all messages by 5 minutes, and it's come in handy for everything from fixing typos to allowing cooler heads to prevail. I also have another rule to deal with those messages that MUST go out immediately. Basically, it looks for a unique character string in the message (I use !~), and if it finds that string, it sends the message without a delay. I've set it as the first rule in my list, with a step to stop processing more rules after it runs. Works like a charm.
-Marc Perton

marc

Comment on Defer Email Delivery in Microsoft Outlook I really wish Gmail had this (does it?). Email may be 24/7, but people still get a bit miffed at emails with "0437hrs" in the corner.

ShipraMedusa