In today’s fast paced life, time is scarce. People are busy with their work, families etc that sometimes people forget to write important emails in time.
Due to this problem Microsoft outlook devised a solution by delivering your emails after a certain delay. This is an immensely helpful feature as now you can write an email whenever you want and send it at a fixed date and time.
By the scheduling feature, you can write responses to your emails in free time and send it when it would be most appropriate, hence you not only are saving your time, but it also deters the situation where one saves their email in draft folder and forget to send it.
Nowadays, people, families and companies are distributed across the globe, and due to the time difference people hesitate in sending their emails but not anymore, because by sending it using email scheduling the email would get sent when the receiving party is most likely to see it and it wouldn’t inconvenience anyone.
The feature of scheduling is not only beneficial to common folks, but it can also be beneficial to industrial or corporate sector. Let’s say you want to send a remainder mail for a monthly meeting, you can send the same mail by rescheduling it for different dates, this allows you to save time as you don’t have to write the email again and again.
Now, let’s see how to schedule an email in outlook.
In outlook, when you compose an email there is an options tab, click on that tab and go to more options there you can select date and time and schedule your email.
Let’s say you scheduled an email and want to change the date and time of its delivery, you can do that by going min the outbox, selecting the email, go to options and reschedule it. Scheduling or delayed delivery is a built-in option only in Microsoft outlook.
You can schedule emails in gmail or yahoo, but it is not an inbuilt feature, you will have to download additional plugins such as boomerang or contact monkey. These additional plugins are software which are designed to add extra options or features to another software.
Having an additional plugin always raises the question of security, as most of the plugins are external softwares there is a risk of data leakage and hence it is in your best interest to use scheduling options which are built into the email software such as outlook or an additional plugin from a trusted source.
A minor inconvenience you will face while scheduling is when you want to schedule emails to different countries, you will have to convert the time of their region when you want them to receive into the time of your region.
Let’s assume you want to send an email from India to America, so you want the email to be received at 9 in the morning. You will have to schedule the email to be sent at 10:30 p.m. to compensate for the time difference in the two regions (Look at the given image for time zones).
Scheduling was a feature which was first introduced in outlook 2010, hence scheduling before that version is not present. Later, scheduling became a part of outlook 2013, outlook365, outlook 2016 and is still a part of outlook 2019. Now, scheduling has become an important feature in an email based organization such as huge corporations and governments. You can find bloggers by name in many companies too.
In a world where emails have become a part of documentation and communication scheduling is a powerful feature which can be used to your advantage but it’s up to you how you want to use it; the possibilities are endless.