Outlook Tip: Delayed Send

Have you ever discovered a typo or mistake after sending an e-mail? Or sent e-mails to the wrong person? This feature will help you set up a “safety net” for the Send button, and save yourself from potential miscommunication.

The idea of delayed send is simple. When you hit Send, Outlook automatically retains your message in the Outbox for a short period of time before actually sending it. In most cases, you won’t notice the delay at all. But if you realize that you made a mistake after you hit Send, you can go to the Outbox and edit the message, so the recipients never see the mistake and you will not have to send another e-mail with clarifications.

Setting up delayed send in Outlook 2007

Go to Tools -> Rules and Alerts.
Click “New Rule”.
Select “Check messages after sending”.
Click “Next”, and then click “Next” again.
When Outlook confirms that you want this rule to apply to every message, click “Yes”.
Check the box next to “defer delivery by a number of minutes”.
Click on “a number of” and choose how many minutes by which you want your e-mails to be delayed.
Click “Finish”.
You are done! During the delay, you can double-click the message at any time to stop it from being sent, make changes and hit Send again (that action will reset the delay as well to give you more time to rethink your modifications).

Note: Outlook needs to be running in order to send the message, so if you want it to be sent, leave Outlook open until your e-mail leaves the Outbox.

What if you need to send an urgent message and don’t want it to be delayed?
Remember that if you set this rule, delayed send will apply to every message. If you want an exception to the rule (either for urgent messages or if you want to delay the delivery of a certain message for longer than the rule specifies), you need to set up a category that exempts mail from the rule.

Go to Tools -> Rules and Alerts.
Select the delayed send rule that you have created.
Click “Change Rule -> Edit Rule Settings”.
Click “Next”.
Click “Yes” for “apply to every message” and click “Next” again.
Under “Are there any exceptions”, check the box next to “except if assigned to category category”.
Click on the “category” link. You will be redirected to the Color Categories window.
Click “New” to create a new category.
Name the category and click OK.
Note: some recipients will see the category attached to the message, so make sure to pick a name you don’t mind other people seeing.
You will now see the selected category checked. Click “OK”.
You will now see that the rule will apply to messages that don’t have the category you’ve created for the exception. Click “Finish”. 

Sending e-mails with the exception

Under the Home tab, click the dialog launcher for the Options.
Click on “Categories” button, choose the name of the category you selected for your delayed send rule exception.

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