Suppose, you have to send an email to your customers to remind them about renewing their service at the desired time or making the payment on time they continue to enjoy the services without any interruption. Since you are busy, you fail to notify the person about the same thing. So, what should you do to reply on time and don’t miss out on anything significant?
This is what we are going to talk about in this blog. We will take you through a step-by-step guide to schedule an email in Outlook.
How to Schedule an Email in Outlook?
Those who have already scheduled their emails and found the job tedious have probably got it all wrong. Scheduling an email in Outlook is easy and straightforward. It doesn’t have complex functionality. Go through the steps below to learn how to delay or schedule the delivery of an individual message or all messages by holding them in the Outbox for a certain period after you press the “Send” button.
Scheduling or Delaying the Delivery of a Single Email
To schedule the delivery of a single email message, here’s what you are going to do.
- Open your Outlook and compose a message.
- Click on the “More Options” arrow (from the group “Tags” in the Ribbon).
- Select the checkbox “Do not deliver before” (under the “Delivery options”) and click the delivery date and time as per your requirement.
- Press the “Close” button.
- You have entered the content, attachments, and other important things that you want to include in the email. Now, click on the “Send” button.
The job is done from your end. The email now stays in the “Outbox” folder. It will remain in that folder until the delivery time that you have set. You can further delay and send the email later if you think the recipient is not available at the moment. To schedule it for later –
- You need to switch to the folder “Outbox”.
- Open the delayed message and click on the same arrow “More Options” from the “Tags” group.
- Clear the “Do not deliver before” checkbox (under the “Delivery options”).
- Click on the “Close” option and “Send”.
Scheduling or Delaying the Delivery of all Messages
To delay the delivery of all messages, it is advised to create a rule.
- Launch your Outlook and click “File”.
- Select the “Manage Rules & Alerts” option and click on the “New Rule” option.
- Under “Start from a Blank Rule” in the “Step 1: Select a template” box, click on the option “Apply rule on messages I send”.
- Now, click on the “Next” button.
- In the list “Step 1: Select condition(s)”, you can select the checkboxes for options that you want. After selecting the checkbox, you need to click on the “Next” button. (A confirmation dialog box will appear if you don’t select any checkboxes. Click ‘Yes’ to apply the rule to all messages that you send.)
- Select the checkbox “defer delivery by a number of minutes” in the list “Step 1: Select action(s)”.
- In the box “Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value)”, you need to click the underlined phrase a number of and enter the time (the number of minutes up to 120 minutes) that you want the messages to be held before they are sent. (You need to remember that you can delay the delivery of the messages up to two hours, not more than that).
- Once you have entered the time, click “OK”.
- Now, click on the “Next” button.
- You may like to choose the checkboxes if you want to make any exceptions.
- Click “Next” and go to the next step where you need to type a name for the rule in the box “Step 1: Specify a name for this rule”.
- Select the checkbox “Turn on this rule” and click “Finish”.
There you go! You have now scheduled all your messages for a later date/ time. After you click the “Send” button, the messages that you have specified will stay in the “Outbox” folder.
