Delay emails in Outlook for 3 minutes and never be annoyed again about premature sending

How often do you get an email, and then one more, handing you the attachment, or correcting a date or re-phrasing a sentence? This can be fixed on the sender side, by delaying the send process and thus get a small time buffer in Outlook.

Emails with Outlook and Exchange are still default in business life. An email is quickly sent, and often sent too quickly. So an attachment you wanted to pass is missing. Or you mis-typed a fact. Usually you recognize right after sending, slapping on your forehead and saying “Geez, this is how it should have been,” but now Outlook already sent out the email.

It is not just on terms like embarrassing, albeit it being possibly true when taking a wrong phrasing and recognizing, but usually it’s inaccuracies. Happens to me, too. And it is on not wanting to hassle the receiver with two emails when one suffices. This has to do with professionalism.

Email is an asynchronous media. This means that no real time communication is taking place, but rather a postcard or a letter: the receiver reads when she has time to. Therefore it does not matter if your email arrives some minutes earlier or later.

We should have a possibility to send an email not immediately, but let it rest some minutes in the outbox so that we can still modify it if necessary. That is possible, Outlook can do.

Create a rule in Outlook: Delay send for all messages

Microsoft Outlook knows processing rules. This means that Outlook can automatically do things when certain preconditions are true. You do not need to program, it is just a few clicks.

Rules in Outlook are exactly the means helping us solve the problem with the immediate sending of emails.

Microsoft describes the necessary steps in their help page Delay the delivery of all messages. The text is quite good, so here is my video of the rule setup.

Rule Exception

Sometimes I still want to send an email immediately, for example when I reply to a colleague with an information bit that she should receive right now – acknowledging that I should rather use an instant messenger like Skype. Or I want to send an email before leaving the office and cannot wait three more minutes before it leaves my laptop.

So I define an exception as also described in the video. The Outlook rule for delayed sending is not applied if my email contains the text (_) in the body of the message. This specific string I chose because I never use in normal writing, and it does not appear in any programming language I know or use. So if I want my email to go out immediately, I add (_) below my signature. It does not draw attention, is no superfluous word. And, it has been a different in the past, but I was pointed out to it being an inappropriate emoji, too.

Procedure description

If you do not want to watch the video, please read on. The text is freely adapted from Microsoft, with my modifications:

1. Click File, then Manage Rules & Alerts.
2. Click New Rule.
3. In the Step 1: Select a template box, under Start from a Blank Rule, click Apply rule on messages I send, and then click Next.
4. In the Step 1: Select condition(s) list, do not select anything but click Next and confirm the question with Yes.
5. In the Step 1: Select action(s) list, select the defer delivery by a number of minutes check box.
6. In the Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value) box, click the underlined phrase a number of and enter the number of minutes for which you want the messages to be held before it is sent. I choose 3 minutes, which usually suffices.
7. Click OK, and then click Next.
8. Select the check boxes for the exception except if the body contains specific words.
9. In the field Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value) box, click the underlined phrase specific words and enter the keyword. I use(.), since it does not stand out in text and never appears for no reason.
10. Click Add, then OK and then Next.
11. In the field Step 1: Specify a name for this rule box, type a name for the rule. I use Send Delay.
12. Select the Turn on this rule check box.
13. Click Finish and confirm the notification.

From now on after clicking on Send with an email or appointment, those will stay in our outbox for the given amount of numbers, and you can modify it there.

The rule runs on your local computer, which means that if you occasionally use Outlook from your smartphone or in a browser, the delayed message is not active and every email that you write and send in the smartphone app or in the browser will go out immediately. This also means that if you shut down your computer immediately after sending, the message will not go out because the delay is taking place on your local computer.

This can be annoying sometimes, when I send an email just before leaving the office and then have to wait three minutes to put the laptop on standby, but you get used to it. And if necessary, I just open the device again at home so that all emails are sent, along with the ones I was writing on the train anyway.

Why not with more refined Outlook rules?

Time and again, I receive inquiries as to whether the rule could be extended to apply only to emails sent to customers, for example, but not within the organization itself. Or only to emails, but not to calendar invitations. Or something else entirely. Most things can always be mapped somehow as a rule, but then it gets more complicated. If I want to filter for recipients outside my own organization, I need an exclusion rule that doesn’t exist in Outlook. And then the question arises as to what should happen if I write to both internal and external recipients in the same message. Even if this could be implemented directly with Outlook rules, the question arises as to whether the rule would still be understandable and, above all, error-free. With everything that I configure myself in Outlook, I always want to be able to quickly find out what the problem is in the event of an error or a malfunction. The more complicated the set of rules I build in Outlook, the more complicated it becomes to understand when a rule does and does not apply and whether it is all correct. In the end, I want to be able to confidently say which rule will be triggered for which message or other item, and what the automation rule will trigger as subsequent action. Call me old-school, but I believe in still being in charge of my email inbox and outbox.

In the specific case of the sending delay, this applies to all messages in my outbox, i.e. internal, external, emails, invitations, simply everything. This makes it very easy to understand the logic: It’s always the same.

The KISS principle holds true: “Keep it simple and stupid!” The simplest solution is preferable because it is more robust and easier to understand.

Even internally, it doesn’t matter if a message takes three minutes longer to go out and reach a colleague. Things are very rarely that time-critical. When we do talk, I don’t use email anyway, but the chat in MS Teams, even for quickly exchanging files if there isn’t a proper shared SharePoint drive for it. Take a realistic look at your workflow and think about when you really, truly, honestly need to send a message immediately and don’t have three minutes to spare. And then think about how you can communicate electronically with your colleagues in real time without abusing the inherently asynchronous medium of email. Because email is just that: asynchronous. Email was always intended more as a letter or postcard, never as a phone call or telegram. Even if we have been using it as such in the business world for decades. But there are now generally available equivalents to phone calls and telegrams in the form of chats, in Microsoft environments as MS Teams.

Additionally, you will be pleased to have an email inbox that is not growing quite as fast as before. Internally, there is practically no longer any reason to send emails with attachments at all, and often no reason for emails at all, because chats, whether as individual or group chats, or in MS Teams channels, are more effective for exchanging information and coordinating topics than replying to constantly branching email threads. If you often send files internally, just try out MS Teams for yourself and you may find that it works much more easily, efficiently and reliably for the purpose than attaching files to an email, and either forgetting to actually do so, or attaching files that are too big for your system or the recipient’s system, and duplicating files unnecessarily when sending them to internal colleagues. Think about it: one ten Megabyte file, sent to 15 colleagues, who forward it to two more colleagues each. This case happens, let’s say, weekly. That is 20 Gigabytes, instead of 450 Megabytes of precious Microsoft Exchange space wasted for nothing.

Email is email, and chat is chat, and data exchange is data exchange. We’ve all been using email for all sorts of things for years, but now it’s time to separate the purposes and tasks from each other all over again.

Outlook is a tool

Outlook is just a tool, nothing less, nothing more.

Mastering Outlook can significantly benefit you in your professional and personal life. By becoming proficient in Outlook, you’ll be able to manage your emails more efficiently, ensuring that you stay organized and never miss important messages. You’ll also be able to better manage your calendar, schedule appointments, and track deadlines, helping you stay on top of your responsibilities and manage your time effectively.

Invest time in learning and mastering Outlook can have a significant positive impact on your productivity, organization, and communication skills, ultimately contributing to your success both professionally and personally.

As always: If your main working tool is a software named Microsoft Outlook, it pays off to devote yourself to it a bit more intensely. That helps everyone: yourself, your colleagues, your business contacts, your business.

Photo: Dr. Joachim Schlosser Fotografie