Has it ever happened to you that you type an email and send it only to realize that you made a really really really bad mstake?  And you wish you can take the email back, but you can’t because you already sent it?  Well here is how you can prevent yourself from being fired by using Outlook to give you a sober second look at the email before you send it.

You can use the "Defer" rule in Outlook which basically pauses the sending of the messages for a predetermined amount of time after you click the Send button.  To set it up follow these instructions.

Select Rules and Alerts from the Tools menu, and then click on the New Rule button.

Under Start from a blank rule, choose Check messages after sending, and then click Next.

Click the Next button again on the Which conditions do you want to check screen, and you’ll be prompted with a dialog box saying that the rule will apply to all messages. Select Yes.

Check the box for defer delivery by a number of minutes, and then click on “a number of" and change the defer minutes to a comfortable number such as 5 minutes.  You can set this number to whatever you like, just make sure it gives you enough time to reconsider.

Click the Next button and give the rule a name.  I called mine “Prevent Being Fired”.

From now on, when you send messages your messages will sit in the Outbox for the length of time you specified.. If you want to stop a message from going out the preferred method is to delete it from the Outbox, but if you think you have enough time you can edit the message and leave it in the Outbox to be sent.

Tags | General, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows XP