How to Schedule Email with Outlook?

When you click Send in Outlook, your email immediately goes to the mailbox server and then to the recipient. If you want an email to be sent automatically after a certain period of time, you can schedule the email in Outlook to send the email at a specific time or enable a fixed delay for sending emails.

Schedule Emails from Outlook

To schedule an email to be sent from the Outlook for Windows desktop application, follow these steps:

1. Create a new email in Outlook, enter the recipient’s address(es) in the To field and fill in the subject and body of the email;
2. On the ribbon, go to the Options tab and click the Delay Delivery button;
3. Turn on the Do not deliver before option and specify the date and time when you want to send your email;
4. Click the Close button. You can now send your email as usual;
5. Your email will be moved to the Outbox folder and sent at the time you specify. At any time before your email is automatically sent, you can open and edit it in your Outbox.

Note. In order for your scheduled e-mails to be sent at the specified time, Outlook must be running on your computer and it must be connected to the Internet.

If you use Outlook on the Web (OWA) to access your Exchange Online or Outlook.com mailbox, you can schedule an e-mail to be sent from the Web interface.

1. Open OWA and start writing an email;
2. Add recipients;
3. Click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Send button and select Send later.
4. Select the date and time you want the email to be scheduled and click Send;
5. The email will be moved to the Drafts folder and will be sent from the mailbox server according to the schedule you set. In this case, it does not matter whether the OWA tab is open in your browser or not.

Delayed Delivery of All Emails in Outlook

You can configure Outlook to send all emails with a certain delay. This automatic delay lets you quickly correct a scheduled email before it reaches recipients.

You can use Outlook mailbox rules to delay sending all emails:

1. Go to File > Account info and click Manage Rules & Alerts button;
2. Create a new rule for the mailbox: New rule > Apply rule on message I send;
3. Skip the rule wizard step of setting rule conditions. A warning will appear:
   This rule will be applied to every message you send. Is this correct?
   Click Yes;
   
4. Select the ‘Delay delivery by a number of minutes’ option in the ‘What do you want to do with the message’ wizard window. Choose how long you want to delay sending your emails. For example, we set 10 minutes here;
   
5. The setup of the Outlook rule is completed. Enter a name for the rule and make sure the ‘Enable this rule’ option is selected;
   
6. Another warning will appear:
   This rule will only run when you check your email in Outlook. If Outlook isn’t running, this rule won’t work for email you check online or from another device.
   
   
7. Now, when you click the Send button in an email, it is not sent immediately, but placed in the Outbox folder. Outlook will automatically send it after the delay specified in your rule.

Scheduled and delayed sending methods only work when the Outlook client is running. You can set up a scheduler task with a PowerShell script that automatically launches the Outlook.exe process if you accidentally close it.

The following script checks whether the Outlook.exe process is running in the current user’s session and, if not, starts it in the background:

$CheckOutlook = ( Get-Process | ? {$_.SI -eq (Get-Process -PID $PID).SessionId}| where { $_.Name -eq "OUTLOOK" } )

if ($CheckOutlook -eq $null ) { Start-Process outlook.exe -WindowStyle Hidden; Start-Sleep -Seconds 2 }

Save this PowerShell code in a file with a .PS1 extension. Use the Task Scheduler to set this PowerShell script to run automatically every 5 minutes.