How to avoid having to unsend emails in Microsoft Outlook

Posted on December 6, 2007 at 4:08 pm

One of the biggest problems I have come across lately with clients is the accidental sending of emails to people who were not supposed to get them for whatever reason! Whether someone was in a fit of rage and fired off a cruel email to a friend or co-worker or whether Outlook just auto-filled the wrong name when you started typing and sent off a love email to your grandfather, it’s nearly impossible to unsend emails sent from Outlook.

If you’ve had this happen to you before and you would like to try avoiding it again, there’s a simple trick that you can use that I learnt from a blogging buddy whereby any email that you send from Outlook can be deferred for a set amount of time before it is actually sent from your Inbox. That’s actually quite awesome because if you fire off an email that you shouldn’t have, you still have time to calm down or figure out your mistake and delete the email before it’s sent.

So how do you go about doing this in Outlook? All you have to do is create a simple rule using the Rules and Alerts wizard. Here it goes:

From the top menu, go to Tools and then Rules and Alerts.

Now we want to create a new rule, go click on the New Rule button at the top left. At the top, choose the “Start from a blank rule” option and select the option “Check messages after sending”.

Click Next and don’t select anything for Step 2. Step 2 is for any conditions that will let you filter the emails that the rule is applied to, however, we want every email we send to have this rule applied on, so click Next.

You may be asked if you want the rule to apply to every email that you send, so click Yes at the prompt. On the next step, you can select the actions you want to perform on the email, so click on “Defer delivery by a number of minutes”.

In the bottom text box, you’ll see a new line appear with the words “a number of” highlighted as a link. Click on it and you can specify the number of minutes to delay emails before they are actually sent.

Choose whatever value you think is appropriate for yourself. I set mine at 3 minutes just in case! Click OK and then click Next. The next step is exceptions, but again, don’t select anything here. Click Next and then give your rule a name and click Finish. Make sure the “Turn this rule on” box is checked.

Now you can rest assured that if you ever accidentally send an email to the wrong person or send something you didn’t want the person to actually read, you can simply go into your Outbox and delete it before the deferred time ends! Neat! Enjoy! Source NirmalTV

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» Filed Under MS Office Tips

Comments

2 Responses to “How to avoid having to unsend emails in Microsoft Outlook”

Nirmal said on : December 6th, 2007 at 11:04 pm

Well I had kept the delay as 2 min.
This is indeed a simple yet powerful trick.

Peggy Duncan said on : December 9th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

I have mine set for 2 minutes. I also created an exception to the rule because sometimes I’m ready to shut down and don’t want to wait. My exception: if I change a message’s Importance to low (in the Options), the email goes right out.