Tips Tuesday: “The Magic of Delayed Delivery”

Ever had a moment where you as soon as you hit send on that e-mail, you realized:

1. That you’d forgotten to attach your attachment;
2. You’d attached the wrong attachment;
3. You didn’t want to say what you’d said in that e-mail or wanted to revise it;
4. You were working in off-hours and actually wanted to send the e-mail during business hours; or
5. You’d sent it to the wrong person?

I certainly have and there is a way that you can help alleviate these e-mail faux pas and provide yourself with an opportunity to pull back an e-mail after you’ve hit “send”. Allow me to introduce you to the Delay Delivery feature!

You can put a delay on every outgoing e-mail that you send. When you hit “send”, the e-mail will go to your Outbox and sit in the Outbox for the specified time period allowing you to go into the Outbox and re-open the e-mail. After you’ve opened the e-mail, you may edit as desired and re-send – or – delete the e-mail in its entirety.

You can use the Outlook Rules feature to set-up Delay Delivery on all your outgoing messages as follows:

1. Navigate to the Rules in your Outlook Ribbon (It will be available in the “Home” tab”)
2. Click “Manage Rules and Alerts
3. Click “New Rule”
4. Click “Apply rule on message I send”
5. Click “Next”
6. Click “Next” and when in the pop-up click “Yes” as you do want the rule to be applied to every message you send
7. Second from the bottom, select “defer delivery by a number of minutes”
8. In the Step 2 box, click on the underlined portion which reads “a number of” and input the number of minutes. I personally use 1 minute and find that’s often enough.
9. Click “Next”
10. Determine if there are any exceptions you want to apply.
11. Click “Next”
12. Name your Rule (I named mine Delay Delivery) and determine if you want it turned on now (it is checked by default)
13. Click “Finish”

Voila! You now have delay delivery set up. If you are in a situation where you want to turn it off temporarily, then navigate back to “Manage Rules and Alerts” and uncheck that particular rule and then click “Apply” and “Ok”.

If you don’t want to turn on Delay Delivery for every e-mail, you may also turn use it on a case-by-case basis by selecting the Delay Delivery from the e-mail composition screen by navigating to “Options” > “Delay Delivery” > “Delivery Options” > and then either check or un-check this box and set the time you’d like the e-mail delivered.

Happy e-mailing!

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