Legal Research

"Outlook's Delay Send is a Godsend"

Posted by Adriana Linares: "How does it happen? Two voices in your head simultaneously cry out, "Go ahead and click send, you're all set" while the other one is screaming "You forgot the attachment!" or "Hey Dumb***, you clicked Reply to All" or even worse, "Don't send it while you are still fuming! Wait!" We all know how that movie ends and we all know how we wish it could unS-END.

Can you recall, retrieve or unsend an email message that has gone out? No, the answer is the NO. In the old days of AOL and even Groupwise, you sure could (if the recipient had not opened it). But today, short of getting onto the recipients actual PC and/or smartphone and/or webmail and/or laptop and/or the other tens of places your ONE email can land, you can fuhgedaboudit.

GMail has a new feature in its Google Labs that allows you to "unsend" a message within 5 seconds and that's kinda cool - I say meh.

Now, what you CAN do if you are an Outlook user is set up your outbound messages to sit in your outbox for a few minutes before they deploy. By default, Outlook is set to send an email out of your OUTBOX and in to another's INBOX as soon as you hit the SEND button - immediately. You can turn that off and then tell Outlook how often it should send - like every 3, 4, 5 or ten minutes. Here's how you set that up:

[Go to the source site listed below for step-by-step directions]

So my outbound emails, will wait for a few minutes before flyingout which then gives me the chance to open the email (if needed) and edit it before I look like an idiot.

Now, these tips are really good for those of use without an Exchange server and an IT department controlling our mail options. If you find that you can't change these settings or they don't seem to comply, talk to your local IT person and see if they can help.

By the way - want to learn more about using Outlook? I'm doing some webinars on Outlook (first one in a series of three is this Friday) and a few other topics in my monthly webinar schedule. Check it out here."

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on June 18, 2009 (boomark / email).