If you have ever sent an email and immediately (or soon) regretted it, you will be pleased to know that (with a little trickery) it is possible to undo the send in Outlook. You can now change your mind even after clicking Send.
What is this Recall or Unsend trickery?
You can use Delay Guard to delay the delivery of (all or selected) emails so that you have a window of time to change your mind. You can choose how many minutes you want this window to be, and you can still send urgent emails immediately.
The email will stay in your Outbox for your set time frame so you can always go back and “unsend it”.
Delay Guard is one of the components of SendGuard for Outlook.
Here is how I personally have setup Delay Guard to delay external emails but still send internal emails immediately.
How to Enable and Setup Delay Guard?
If you haven’t done so already, download and install SendGuard for Outlook.
Restart Outlook.
Open the SendGuard settings screen. Go to the “Standss Outlook Addins” Tab Select More -> Setting to display the Setting screen.
Select the Delay Guard tab.
(1) Tick the Enable Delay Guard check box and set the delay time to an appropriate value (I like 2 minutes because it gives me enough time to change my mind and still gets my email out fast enough)
(2) This step is optional but there may be some email addresses or domains to which you want to send emails immediately i.e. you do not want to delay emails to them. In my case, I do not want to delay emails to people within my own organization.
(3) You can get Delay Guard to display a little notification bubble at the bottom of the screen when it delays an email. I like to have this turned on as it reminds me why the email is not being sent out immediately.
What if you want to send emails immediately?
While delaying emails is a good safety feature, you will still want to send out some emails immediately. Easy!
Write your email as you normally do so.
Tick the Send Now box on the Ribbon.
Click Send.
The email will be sent immediately i.e. Delay Guard will not keep it in your Outbox.
Even more security
I hope that this tip helps you avoid the embarrassment or loss that can be caused by hastily sent emails. I recommend that you combine this tip with the SendConfirm prompt of SendGuard, which gets users to confirm both recipients and attachments before emails are sent out.
Click on the image below to learn more about the full SendGuard for Outlook email security (DLP) bundle which includes both Delay Guard and Send Confirm for Outlook.
