Google recently announced a very neat little feature to its email service Gmail.

What is now does is after sending an email there is a short window of opportunity to cancel the email. It can be set between 5 and 30 seconds but the default time is set to 5 seconds.

There are plenty of horror stories of people sending the wrong emails to the wrong people and it causing chaos so this new feature will come in very handy when that sinking feeling of “OMG, what have I just done?!” comes into play.

So, wouldn’t it be just great if you could do this same thing with Outlook and Office 365? Well you can and it’s very easy to do.

1. First select File in Outlook which is in the top left hand corner
   
2. Then select Manage Rules and alerts
   
3. Then select apply rule on messages I send
   
   4. Then select Next
   
   5. If you wish, apply conditions if not just select Next
   
   6. This pop up will appear select Yes
   
   7. Now in the rules wizard, tick the box “Defer delivery by a number of minutes”
   
   8. Then in the box below titled step 2, click the underlined words “ a number of”
   
   9. Set the number of minutes you wish to delay your emails being sent by
   
   10.  Then click Next again
   
   11. Select any exceptions you wish to apply and then select Next or if none select Next
   12. Then simply name your rule and ensure the Turn on the Rule checkbox is ticked then hit Finish
   

Once you then apply this rule you are all set and all your emails are delayed by whatever time you set.

So, in the case that you do accidentally reply to all or put the wrong price in the email you will have whatever time frame you gave yourself to go into your drafts and amend or even delete the email in question.

This takes all of 2 minutes to set up and could save you a lot of embarrassment  or difficult conversations.