shahine.com/omar/

My buddy Reeves just pointed me to a sweet Outlook feature that I never knew about called Do not deliver before. In a recent post I commented on how I'm trying to get in the habit of not doing work email on weekends, vacations etc. Well one problem with this is I could be on a plane or a train and I want to hammer out some mails from my inbox (but don't want to send them, because that sets a bad example). Additionally, if people are on vacation, I know that my email will just sit in their inbox and drift down to the bottom and possibly get lost. Worse, if they check their email over their vacation, I don't want to create work for them and stress them out.

Here is a good example. It's 1 am, and I just thought of something I want to tell my manager and our admin. Well they are both on vacation till Monday. So what is the point of sending this to them now? It could get lost, or read and left in the inbox. Instead I have scheduled to have it delivered Monday afternoon.

So, using "Do not deliver before", you can just tell Outlook not to send the message before a specific date and time. To do this simply:

1. In a new mail message select Options from the Toolbar (if you are using Word Mail)
2. Click the Do not deliver before checkbox and enter a date and time.
3. Hit send

Viola!

Update: Thanks to Chris Graham for letting me know that if you have an Outlook Deferred Deliver Rule this will override the per message option and deliver the mail according to those settings.