Tip o’ the Week #9: Delay sending email

Some hae meat and canna eat,
and some wad eat that want it.
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
and sae the Lord be thankit. – R. Burns

If you’ve become a regular reader of these Tips, you may have spotted that we’ve skipped a few from the numerical sequence. That’s because they were either Microsoft-specific (and not of much use for external consumption), or were in fact regurgitations of stuff I’d posted to this blog before. Like the bulk Outlook Contacts updater tool that makes all your Contacts’ phone numbers conform to the standard – here .

So that I can keep the sequence the same for the internal and external versions of these tips, I’ll periodically skip a few numbers.

Have you ever sent an email then wished you hadn’t?
Or thought “whoops”, just spotted a mistake?

It’s easy to set Outlook to give you a safety net, where emails sit in your Outbox for a few minutes before being sent – you can fish them back out, make changes and resend if necessary.

In Outlook, go into the Rules & Alerts settings (in Outlook 2010, it’s on the File menu), and

• create a new rule
• “Start from a blank rule” / “Apply on messages I send”
• Select “Next” to apply the rule to every message sent (on the “Which condition(s) do you want to check” tab)
• On the “what do you want to do with this message” page, select the “Defer delivery” option and choose the number of minutes

On a Message-by-message basis, you can set delivery delays too – in Outlook 2010, when you’re writing a message and about to send, look on the ”Options” tab on the Ribbon …

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