Email "Dump Button"

Type type type type, send. AUGH! WAIT! NO!

We've all had it happen. You click Send, type Alt-S or press Ctrl-Enter to send your message off, and 1.3 milliseconds later you realize that you sent it to the wrong person, had a typo, or forgot the attachment. Usually this only happens once every couple months but it happened twice to me today. Thankfully neither will get me fired, but it's still embarrassing and potentially threatening to your stream of income.

Talk radio has a 7-second delay so they can hit the "dump button." Email should have the same thing. It turns out to be very easy and the feature is built into Outlook. The explanation comes from https://computersoftware.suite101.com/article.cfm/delay_sending_email.

• Open Outlook, click on START, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Outlook.
• Click on TOOLS, Rules & Alerts.
• Click on New Rule "Start from a blank rule".
• Click in Step 1 box, "Check message after sending".
• Next, click on "On this machine only".
• Next, Click in Step 1 box, "Defer delivery by a number of minutes".
• Click in Step 2 box, "a number of" enter the number of minutes (usually 1).
• Click on OK, click on Finish.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2008
  You can also get similar results by changing the settings that force a send/recieve immediately after you hit "send".  This gives you a buffer, although not as well defined as your solution, as you don't know how many minutes it will be to the next TX/RX.