Austin Lane

All of us has heard stories of the unfortunate employee that forwarded an email to everyone in the company that should have been private, and how that same employee was either fired or disciplined for that action. For those of us that sometimes are less than diligent about ensuring that we only click “Reply” instead of “Reply to All”, I will guide you through the necessary steps to delay the sending of email in Outlook.

The first thing you need to do is open Outlook. Next, you should click on “Tools”, and then select “Rules and Alerts”. This will open a window that lists all of the rules that are applied to your email when you send or receive it. Click on the “New Rule” button. Under “Start from a Blank Rule”, select “Check messages after sending” and then click “Next”.

Click the “Next” button on the “Which conditions do you want to check” window. You will be prompted with the following message, “This rule will be applied to every message you send. Is this correct?”. Click “Yes” to continue.

On the next screen, check the box for “defer delivery by a number of minutes”, and then, in the lower portion of the screen, click on “a number of” and change the default number of minutes to a reasonable number, such as 5 minutes. You can set this setting at whatever time frame you want, but be careful to ensure that it is short enough to ensure the email will be sent before you close Outlook.

Click “Next”. You will now have an opportunity to put a name for the rule. I named my rule “Stop sending embarrassing emails”, but you can name it whatever you like, but make sure you make it memorable.

The next time you write an email, you will notice that it stays in the Outbox for the time period you specified, and then is sent.

Hopefully this pause will give you time to catch any email that you send that you might regret sending. Continue browsing Jeff’s Tech Tips for more tips to improve your computing experience. You may also want to check out the How-to Geek for other tips for your computer system.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Email, Internet, Jeff's Tech Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.