If you’ve ever sent an email and had to cringe when you saw the reply, you’re not alone. Email is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, but it can also be a source of embarrassment if your messages get lost in the shuffle. To avoid this problem, use Outlook rules to automatically send important emails only if they’ve been replied to or responded to within a certain timeframe. This way, you can avoid those dreaded “Oh no!” moments when you realize that your email has gone unanswered. Here are four tips for using Outlook rules:

  1. Create a rule that sends an email only if it has been replied to or responded to within a certain timeframe.
  2. Create multiple rules that send different types of emails based on whether they have been replied to or not.
  3. Use conditional formatting in your email messages to indicate whether they have been replied to or not.
  4. Use Automated Response features in Outlook 2013 and later versions to automatically reply to all unopened messages from specific people or groups with a preset message or template ..

Using the “Defer” rule in outlook, we can setup a rule that essentially pauses all message delivery for a few minutes after you click the Send button, to give you a chance to recover.

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 this dialog informing you that the rule will apply to all messages. If you want to, you can set this rule up to only work for certain groups.

On the next screen, check the box for “defer delivery by a number of minutes”, and then click on “a number of” and change the defer minutes to something like 5 minutes, although you can change it to whatever you’d like.

I originally tried using a 1 minute delay, but it didn’t give me enough time to realize the mistake and then locate the message and fix the problem.

Click the Next button, and then give the rule a name, preferably something memorable so you’ll recognize it in the list.

Now when you send messages, you’ll notice that they sit in the Outbox for a few minutes. If you want to stop a message from going out, your best bet is to just delete it from the Outbox, but you could attempt to just fix the mistake and then resend.