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How to Delay, Unsend Email Send Gmail and Outlook To Avoid Horrible Mistakes and Embarrassment

by Fahad Saleem

You are sitting in your office or home, frustrated and exhausted at some bad thing that is going on in your day. You receive an email from your subordinate, colleague or your friend, and you quickly write a reply and press that “Send” button only to regret the second later.

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In our daily life we come across countless moments when we wish we hadn’t spoken that word or written that email. But that’s how the human beings are. If you want to avoid the horrors or getting swept away in the spur of the moment, you can use the delay email send Gmail and Outlook features to avoid embarrassment. What this feature will do? It will not send the email for a few moments, even when you press the send button. This is to give you a chance to take back your words. Trust me, it is super useful. Before thing feature, I used to regret and crib over the small grammatical mistakes, bad choice of words and structure after sending the email. But now I can write the email in peace and send because I know I have the delay email send in Gmail and Outlook feature. Let’s have a look at how to enable this email delay send feature in Outlook and Gmail. You can literally unsend email in Gmail and Outlook with this trick.

How to Delay Email Send Gmail and Outlook

Delay Email Send in Outlook

In order to enable delay send an email in Outlook, follow the below mentioned steps.

Go to the Home tab in your outlook and click on the drop down list of “Rules”

 Click “Manage Rules and Alerts”

Now click on the “New Rule” option under the “Email Rules” and click on “Start a Blank Rule” under “Apply Rule on Messages I sent”. This is to apply a new check for all the messages you send from your outlook account. Basically, this is an event being created to keep a check on sending emails.

Now click on Next and follow on-screen instructions.

On the “Actions” page, you will see an option “Defer Delivery By”. You can select any number of minutes by which you want to delay the send operation. Outlook won’t commit the final send event until those minutes have passed.

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After entering the number of minutes, you can press next and proceed. You can also add exceptions to the new rule of sending delay. These exceptions let you bypass this rule. For example, if you want some email to be sent quickly without any delay, you can specify a rule and then write the email accordingly. To give you an example, you can use the “Except if” option. So you can select “Except if the subject starts with ‘$’”. So whenever your subject has $ sign, it will not be delayed in sending and it will be sent quickly, the moment you press the send button.

After making exceptions, click on Next and then click “Finish” to save the changes.

You can also use the “Do Not Delivery Before” option in Outlook to keep a long check on email. You can specify date and time and the email you write will not be sent before that time. In this way, you can get enough time to wait and evaluate your email message. This option is also necessary if you are waiting for some important deadline or business event.

You can enable Do Not Send Before feature from the ribbon menu bar.

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Delay Send Gmail

If you want to delay send email in Gmail, there are two ways to do that. A few months ago Gmail launched an Undo Send feature which lets you take back you email. But the time limit for that is 30 seconds. That means you can undo a sent email in 30 seconds, otherwise it will be sent to the person you specified in your recipients. Check out our guide on how to set Gmail undo send feature.

If you want to add long delays in Gmail send email process, I would suggest using this Chrome extension. It lets you delay the email up to 15 minutes.

Go to Gmail and write your email message.

Install the extension which I mentioned above.

Extension will ask you to access your apps and Gmail. Allow it.

Now you have to open the Google Sheet. Why? Because this add-on uses the Google Sheet to schedule the email. If you have installed the extension in the right way and gave the access, it will be synced with Sheet. Just go to Add-on menu in Sheet and click on “Email Scheduler and then click on Configure.

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You will then see a section on the right side. Click on the drop down and you will see the email you just wrote in your gmail. All the drafts are shown here. Click on the email you want to schedule and then specify the time. You can delay gmail send for a few minutes to unsend email in Outlook or Gmail.

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That’s it. This was how to delay or unsend email send in Gmail and Outlook. In case of any question, feel free to comment on this post.

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