That email delay rule again

MVP Diane Poremsky, keeper of the excellent Outlook Tips site, passed on a couple of ideas in her daily tips email yesterday on how to prevent the accidental sending of an email. The first tip was to leave the addressee fields blank until you're ready to send the email and the second was to intentionally misspell any word within the body of the email so the spellchecker comes to your rescue if you inadvertently press Send or CTRL+ENTER or ALT+S.

I've always been fascinated by the way we (humans) develop workarounds to ensure that the technology we use makes allowances for our failings. Intentionally misspelling a word or typing in the addressee after composing an email are illogical behaviours but they help protect us from simple human mistakes. The best defence I've personally found though is to delay the sending of every email by 2 minutes. There's something magical that happens when I press the send button. Very often, all those extra bits of information, forgotten attachments and missed addressees flood into my mind. Thankfully my 2 minute delay gives me a safety net, an extra chance to rescue my email before it disappears from the Outbox.

Over time this has proved the most effective defence against accidental sending. Again, it's just an unnatural workaround but one that doesn't require me to deliberately misspell words or draft my email in an illogical way. And, of course, I've put an exception in my rule that means that any email flagged as High Importance gets sent immediately or, when I don't want to use the High Importance flag, there's a short character string that I add somewhere to the subject or body of the message that tells Outlook that this email doesn't need to be delayed for 2 minutes.

My regular reader will also notice that I now recommend a 2 minute delay, not just 1 minute. Why? Because from my experience Outlook only reads minute from the system clock, not seconds, so if I press send at the 59 second mark my email will still depart 1 second later even with a 1 minute delay in place. Using 2 minutes guarantees at least a 1min 1 second delay. More than enough to catch most human oversights.

To learn how to set a sending delay on your emails, view the [email] blogcast mentioned in this post: https://blogs.technet.com/usefultechnology/archive/2005/04/22/404061.aspx

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I've previously posted about Outlook's annoying Ctrl-Enter shortcut which instantly sends your email,...