by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on
Three ways to delay send in Outlook: delay delivery of a particular message, create a rule to defer all emails, or schedule auto sending.
Does it often happen to you that you send a message and a moment later you wish you hadn't? Perhaps you clicked Reply All instead of Reply, or accidentally sent sensitive information to a wrong person, or just realized that your angry response was a bad idea and you need to cool down and think of better arguments.
The good news is that Microsoft Outlook provides a way to recall a message that has already been sent. However, that only works for Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange accounts and has many other limitations. A more reliable way is to prevent these kinds of situations by delaying email sending for a certain interval. This will give you a bit of time for afterthought and an opportunity to grab a message from the Outbox folder before it actually goes out.
If you want a specific message to go out at a particular time, the simplest solution is to delay its delivery. Here are the steps to schedule an email in Outlook:
A scheduled mail will be waiting in the Outbox folder until the specified delivery time. While in the Outbox, you are free to edit or delete the message.
If you've changed your mind at a later point, you can change or cancel a delayed delivery in this way:
Depending on your choice in step 3, the message will either be sent right away or remain in the Outbox until the new delivery time.
Tips and notes:
All outgoing messages in Outlook are routed through the Outbox folder. Unless you disabled the default setting, once a message gets into the Outbox, it is sent immediately. To change this, set up a rule to delay email sending. Here's how:
To delay sending of all emails, do not check any options, simply click Next. Outlook will ask you to confirm that you want the rule to be applied to every message that you send, and you click Yes.
After you click the Send button, the message will be routed to the Outbox folder and remain there for the time interval that you've specified.
Tips and notes:
Out of the box, Outlook is configured to send emails immediately, which is not what many of us want. Luckily, you can easily turn off that setting and determine yourself when your email is to go out.
To prevent Outlook from sending and receiving email automatically, this is what you need to do:
With these three options disabled, you have full control over sending and receiving your mail. To do this, either press F9 or click the Send/Receive All Folders button on the Send/Receive tab of the Outlook ribbon.
If you might be at times absent-minded or are often distracted by phone calls or your colleagues, you may simply forget to timely receive mail and miss important messages. To prevent this from happening, it would be wise to schedule automatic send/receive with a time interval that works best for your needs.
Note. If you performed the above steps but your Outlook still sends and receives mail automatically, most likely you don't have control over your server. Alas, you will have to live with it.
To schedule automatic send/receive in Outlook, this is what you need to do:
If you are curious about the other two options in the first group, this is what they do:
Please note that scheduling an automatic send/receive works differently from the defer delivery rule:
Also, you can set up an out of office auto-reply to inform people who sent you an email that you are out of office and will get in touch later. Also, we'd recommend configuring Outlook Junk Mail Filter to block as many unsolicited emails as possible.
That's how to delay sending email in Outlook. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week!
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