Delay Sending of Email Message in Microsoft Outlook (Supports Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and all POP3/IMAP Mail)
Occasionally you may need to delay or postpone delivery or sending or an email message. Normally, when you click on “Send” button, the email will be sent immediately, no matter you’re using desktop email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird, or web-based email services (of course, not when you disconnect from Internet when using offline desktop mail client where email cannot be sent out). The ability to delivery delivery of mail message will be useful in such a case where you want a mail to only be delivered to recipients on future date such as birthday wishes, appointment reminders, anniversary celebration, holiday or ocassion greetings, or simply to avoid sending mail to person on vacation when you know that he or she won’t back before certain date, and etc. Microsoft Outlook provides such a feature called “Do Not Deliver Before” to postpone sending of email to future date or time, and enable all POP3, IMAP, HTTP or Microsoft Exchange Server email services.
In Microsoft Outlook, to enable delay sending of emails at a specified time and date later than current time, or postponing the delivery date and time, use following steps:
- In the Message window (where you type your email content), click the Options button. Alternatively, click on View -> Options.
- In the Message Options dialog window, select and tick the “Do Not Deliver Before” check box, under the Delivery Options. Then choose the desired send date and time to deliver the email by using the calendar and time drop down list.
- Click Close and then click OK.
The email message that is delayed sending in future date will be held in the Outbox folder after you clicking on Send button. Once the specified assigned date and time is reached, the email will be sent and delivered, and email been moved to Sent Items folder automatically, provided you’re connected to Internet.
The delay email sending trick works in most version of Microsoft Outlook, i.e Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2003, XP and 2000. Beside, as the Do Not Deliver Before delay sending function is a feature of Microsoft Outlook (but not Outlook Express), works independently of email account providers, and Outlook can be configured to access many popular free email accounts, thus the postponement of email sending feature can be extend to these free mail accounts, as long as these email providers support one of the email transfer protocols that Outlook supports, such as POP3, SMTP, IMAP, Microsoft Exchange Server and HTTP (for MSN and Hotmail or Windows Live Mail). In quick glance, almost all of the most popular free webmail such as Google Gmail, Yahoo (only paid premium account), Hotmail (Windows Live Mail), Fastmail, AOL, Inbox.com, AIM, HotPOP, can delay sending message by configuring Outlook to access the email account instead of using webmail interface.
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September 10th, 2009 23:02
Thanks for this tip – very useful.
For those of you using Outlook connected to exchange server, you need to be running in “Cached Exchange Mode”:
Go to: Tools | Account Settings
Select the “E-mail” tab, and then double-click on “Microsoft Exchange Server” (or select it and hit “Change…”).
Click “More Settings…”
Switch to the “Advanced” tab, and check “Use Cached Exchange Mode”.
This way, messages are moved to your Outbox, rather than sent to exchange immediately, and only moved into your Sent Items once the time has been reached.
You will also need to have Outlook open at the time the message is to be sent, and you’ll be warned that there are messages in your Outbox if you try and close Outlook before then.
July 29th, 2009 06:21
thank you that was very helpful and exactly what i needed.
July 27th, 2009 20:47
Configured the e-mail in Outlook 2007
When i click send button, it is taking several time Nearly(5 to 8 Min) to Delivery the Msg.
July 17th, 2009 17:59
Do you need to leave Outlook opened?
May 28th, 2009 18:24
BTW if anyone is looking for an easy way to send a delayed email and they don’t have outlook, well they don’t have to miss out.
You can schedule email for delivery here: schedulemail
October 31st, 2008 16:38
[...] time to make this a standard. Not just a feature in some mail clients. ← When public humility doesn’t change you [...]
October 24th, 2008 05:45
[...] I already have that capability in Microsoft Office Outlook (I just didn’t know I did) – and as described at My Digital Life, all I needed to do was set a Do not deliver before date and time in the message options. I went [...]
September 26th, 2008 08:45
Não consigo enviar email do Outlook 2007 através da minha conta do hotmail, o outlook pede para atualizar o Microsoft Office Outlook Conector – mas o meu software do office é pirata e eu não consigo atualizar , por favor vc não podem me dar uma solução ?
Obrigada.
August 8th, 2008 12:27
Unfortunately the method described in this article shows the time a person actually hits “send” on a message in Outlook–not the time used in the option to delay to a future time.
I stay up late and often draft emails for work the next day. I would really like to be able to write an email at 2:30am and set it to send at 7:30am the next day.
Following this article, my test emails show 2:30am and not 8:30am. The email does not arrive until after the scheduled time, but the send header has the original time.
I guess I am going to have to break down and tweak my schedule
November 8th, 2007 10:00
time delayed email…
So as to not appear too eager to reply to an email, I’d like to compose an email and have it auto-sent on a future date/time. And, I’ve been weaning myself to check email only once an hour or less. This should help with (increasing) my prod…
November 8th, 2007 09:08
The date & timestamp of the delayed email sent via Outlook (not Outlook Express) will be the actual date/time when the email was sent. This will be no earlier than the future date set, but it may be later — depending on how often Outlook is setup to automatically do a send/receive.
August 29th, 2007 11:03
Question: Does mail sent via the delayed feature in Outlook Express show the actual date sent/mailed or does it show the date of the mail’s generation? Can the date of sending the email be achieved? If yes, how can this be done?