OOPS – Can I have that email back?
Have you ever had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you hit the “send” button just a little bit too quick? I wish I had a dollar for every time I realized I had made a mistake immediately after hitting the send button on an email. We have all experienced that — usually we only forgot an attachment or didn’t run spell check but sometimes much more serious errors — like realizing you hit “reply to all” when you didn’t mean too.
If you use Outlook there is a solution. Just set up a rule to have all your emails sit in your out box for 2 minutes before they actually send. This allows you plenty of time to “grab them back” and correct the error.
Here are the step by step instructions:
- In Outlook, click on Tools -> Rules and Alerts.
- Under the E-mail Rules tab click on New Rule.
- Choose “Start from a blank rule” and select “Check messages after sending”.
- Click the Next button.
- Select the condition “on this machine only” (you may have to scroll down to the bottom of the list).
- Click the Next button.
- Select “defer delivery by a number of minutes”.
- Click “a number of” in the bottom box and change it to the length of time you want to set for delay. I use 2 minutes and find it is enough but use your own judgment here.
- Click the Next button.
- This screen gives you options for exclusions to the rule — just skip it by clicking the Next button.
- Finish the rule set up by naming the rule. Mine is named “Don’t send stupid emails” .
- Be sure the box is checked to Turn on this rule and click Finish.
Now the next time you want to grab an email back just open the out box and be glad things aren’t instantaneous any more!
Comments
You read my mind!!!!!!!! YIKES, that has happened to me more times than I care to admit.
Thanks for the awesome tip!
(It takes a village………….)
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