How to get rid of a large portion of your email mistakes?

It must sound as a familiar story to all of us: you’re typing a mail and you either click send too soon, you accidently hit CTRL+ Enter or you suddenly realize “oops I shouldn’t have written that”.

You should know that you can activate a feature in Outlook that will help avoid these “accidents”. You can delay the delivery of messages with a few minutes just to avoid the aforementioned scenarios. Here is how to activate the feature for all your mails or a selection based on some specific rules.

Delay the delivery of all messages

1. Click the File tab.
2. Click Manage Rules and Alerts.
3. Click New Rule.
4. 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.
5. In the Step 1: Select condition(s) list, select the check boxes for any options that you want, and then click Next.

If you do not select any check boxes, a confirmation dialog box appears. If you click Yes, the rule that you are creating is applied to all messages that you send.

1. In the Step 1: Select action(s) list, select the defer delivery by a number of minutes check box.
2. 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 sending.

Delivery can be delayed up to 120 minutes.

1. Click OK, and then click Next.
2. Select the check boxes for any exceptions that you want.
3. Click Next.
4. In the Step 1: Specify a name for this rule box, type a name for the rule.
5. Select the Turn on this rule check box.
6. Click Finish.

After you click Send, each message remains in the Outbox folder for the time that you specified.

Delay the delivery of a specific single message

1. In the message itself, on the Options tab, in the More Options group, click Delay Delivery.
2. Click Message Options.
3. Under Delivery options, select the Do not deliver before check box, and then click the delivery date and time that you want.

After you click Send, the message remains in the Outbox folder until the delivery time.

If you decide later that you want to send the message immediately, do the following:

1. In Mail, in the Navigation Pane, click the Outbox folder.
2. Open the delayed message.
3. On the Options tab, in the More Options group, click Delay Delivery.
4. Under Delivery options, clear the Do not deliver before check box.
5. Click Close.
6. Click Send.

Source: Office Help / Useful features