Ken Muse

How To Delay Outlook Messages


Ever had a moment where you wish you could go back and quickly make one last edit to an email or check one thing before it went out? That happened to me a few times. My solution? Configure Outlok to delay my messages by two minutes. That’s just enough time to make sure I’m absolutely certain I have things correct. Here are the steps.

  1. In the main Outlook window, select Rules, then Manage Rules & Alerts, then New rule

  2. Choose Apply rule on messages I send

  3. For the condition choose marked as importance and choose Normal importance. This means that if you mark an email as low or high priority, it will skip this rule.

  4. For the action, choose defer delivery by a number of minutes and specify the delay. I find two minutes to be a nice balance.

And if you need to send something immediately? Just mark it high priority or update the delivery delay so it is set to an earlier time in the day:

  1. In your email message, choose Options, then Delay Delivery.

  2. Configure the Do not deliver before time to an earlier point in the day.