Deferring Messages in Outlook

Posted on: February 24, 2009 | By: Elite | Filed under: Tech Tips

To conclude our run with Outlook, we have one last tip to prevent those panic moments when you realize you just sent an email to the wrong person, forgot to include someone else in the email, didn’t attach the attachment, or attached the wrong attachment. This stuff can happen all the time and it can end up having some pretty negative results.

Deferring Messages

So what is one way to prevent these situations? You can set a delay on the sending of your messages, just in case you do make this mistake. So, when you send a message, it will stay in your Outlook Outbox for a certain number of minutes (that you specify) before actually being sent. To do this:
1. Click Tools on the menu and then click Rules and Alerts.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click New Rule…. (See Figure 1)
3. In the next dialog box that appears, click on Check messages after sending and then click Next. (See Figure 2)
4. In the next dialog box is where you choose what e-mail messages this rule is applied to. So, if you only want this rule to be for messages sent to certain people, you can choose that, or if you want all of your messages delayed you can choose On this Machine Only at the bottom of the list by clicking in the box next to it, and then click Next.
5. The next dialog box is where you choose the action that you want to apply to these messages. So, you can have the message CC’ed to another person or have it marked as importance. In this case though, we want to choose Defer Delivery by a number of minutes by again clicking the box next to it. DO NOT CLICK NEXT YET.
6. Now we have to set the number of minutes to delay the message. When you clicked the previous option, it should have shown up at the bottom half of the dialog box with the words “a number of’ as a hyperlink. Click this link and another dialog box (Figure 3) should appear.
7. In this box, choose the number of minutes you want to defer the message by (in the example I chose 5 minutes) and then click OK.
8. In the next dialog box you can choose all of the exceptions (if any) that you want to this rule. You can make all e-mails sent to yourself or your friends as exceptions, or whatever you like. In this case, we won’t make any exceptions.
9. You should now see a dialog box that asks you to finalize the rule by giving it a name and reviewing it (See Figure 4). After doing this, click Finish and the rule is created!

Now when you click the Send button in an email, it will stay in your Outbox for the amount of time that you indicate before it gets sent out. We hope that this will save you a lot of hair-pulling moments.

That’s all for now! Until next week,
The elite Program

 

Comments are closed.