Eric’s Believe-It or Not: Delay Send Saves Me Time, Effort and a lot of Misery

ReplyToSome has a feature that delays the emails I’m sending out and it is saving me a lot of time and effort. It also has significantly reduced my daily intake of anxiety headache medicine.

The feature, “Delay Send”, is an outbox delay timer. It works after I press “send” on an email by instructing Microsoft Outlook to hold the email in my outbox for a set amount of time – 10 seconds, 45 seconds, 2 minutes, or another time of my choice – allowing me to retrieve the message and edit or delete it before it goes out.

What??!!, you say?  Really now, a feature that slows down your outgoing email actually saves you time and effort?   C’mon, get serious.   

Nope, I’m not kidding.  This feature has saved me countless headaches and actually lets me do productive work in email (if there truly is such a thing) without the anxiety of sending something I wish I hadn’t.  I’ll have to admit I’ve become reliant (would “addicted” be the more appropriate word?) on the feature in ReplyToSome, and now it’s simply a part of the way I work in my desktop version of Microsoft Outlook.

Here’s how: I conduct a considerable amount of work via email… most of my client interactions occur via email, and as a result, I receive and send hundreds of emails every day. With that number of emails arriving in my inbox and being sent from my outbox, something is bound to go wrong… which it did in the past with alarming frequency. Then I discovered ReplyToSome.

Now, if you want to dig into Outlook’s advanced settings, you might be able to reproduce the effect of the delay timer by building custom rules.  But ReplyToSome allows you to directly set up the timer with a couple of mouse clicks from within your email. Just select “SendCheck Settings” from the settings menu and then check the box under “Delay Send”. The delay setting can be adjusted from 0 seconds (or it can be turned-off entirely) to 999 seconds.  I have mine set for 45 seconds.  (Sometimes I wish it were more.)

So now, when I’m quickly drafting emails and believe they’re complete, I click “send” without worry or doubt, and off they go to my Outbox. And fortunately, the delay timer keeps them there for 45 seconds.  Almost invariably, I’ll remember something in one of the emails I’ve overlooked, need to correct, or reread, or rewrite, or perhaps kill entirely.  Every day I go back to my outbox to catch and correct spelling or grammar issues that would likely make it appear to one or more of my clients that English is a second language for me.  Just today I caught this sentence: “I will be happy to schedule the meeting at you convenience”.    Spellcheck didn’t highlight it for me, but a quick reread let me catch and correct it.  

That was an easy one, but there have been times when I’ve forgotten entire sentences, angered a client by neglecting a single word in an important sentence, or frankly have written emails that should never have been committed to text – and fortunately I’ve been able to delete them before they’ve been sent – thanks to the delay timer ReplyToSome has in its neat little bag of valuable tricks.  Saved by the bell… or should I say the timer, as it is in my case. 

So if you’re like me and spend a lot of time communicating via email in Microsoft Outlook, check out the “Delay Send” feature in ReplyToSome.   It will save you – time and time again, and again, and again.

Till next time – Eric the Red