The bad news is that Gmail does not support scheduling emails at the time of this posting. The good news is that it does support IMAP, which allows you to access your Gmail account from a third-party email client. So all you need to do is set up your Gmail account in your desktop client, such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird. You can then use the delay send feature of your desktop email client to schedule the sending of a message in Gmail. If you don’t have a desktop email client, two of the three I mentioned above are free, so get set up on one of those first.
To schedule sending a Gmail message in Microsoft Outlook 2007:
1. Create a new IMAP email account: Tools >Account Settings… > New
2. Enter your Gmail address (note: I am showing the detailed settings, however the wizard will work fine).
3. Nothing special for outgoing server
4. Port settings: I’ve seen others quoted. These work for me.
5. Open a new email and click the Options tab:
6. Click on “Delay Delivery”
7. Set the desired delivery time.
8. Compose and send the message. That’s it!
Want to set up a 5 second delay in sending your Gmail messages? 5 seconds is not a lot of time, but it’s better than nothing, especially if you’ve ever hit send and immediately thought of a revision or had a twinge of regret (or good judgement).
The Gmail undo feature is in testing now, so you’ll need to log in to Gmail, and go to “Settings” and then the “Labs” tab. There you’ll see a long list of features you can try out. It’s so long that you’ll want to ctrl f “Undo” to find the Undo feature. Enable the feature. I had to log out of Gmail and back on to get it to work.
Now when you send an email, you’ll see an “Undo” link at the top, where it notifies you that the email has been sent. Click on that link fast, because it will disappear in 5 seconds!
I’ve had a Gmail account for around a year now, but have never used in much until recently. I have four different accounts for different purposes that I use regularly, and I had no need for another. With the new feature that allows you to send email from Gmail using headers from your other email accounts, Gmail started looking like an email consolidation solution for me. In addition, I can access it behind corporate firewalls that block other webmail services (maybe they just haven’t caught on yet).
I started forwarding all of my email accounts to gmail. When I hit reply to those forwarded emails, they appear to be coming from the account they were sent to, even though they were received, composed and sent from Gmail.
Everything was moving along smoothly, until today. I was on deadline with a newspaper ad. I emailed the 1.3 MB PDF file as an attachment to three different people. Three times each. It took two hours or more for my client’s to receive the files. Bad surprise. I sent the same file with Outlook and the client received it in a few minutes, as you would expect.
I guess that is the downside to using a Web based email service. The unexpected delays. I’ve had a hotmail account, and would have intermittent problems, so why should Gmail be any different? So be warned – using Gmail for business, especially in today’s fast paced, demanding environment, may not be a good idea.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are downloading email from another server, into gmail, you are very likely to experience delays, as Gmail will only download from your server periodically, based on they amount of email you typically receive. To immediately download email into Gmail from an external account, do the following:
1) From Gmail, click on “Settings”
2) Click on the “Accounts” tab
3) Scroll down to the “Get mail from other accounts:” heading
4) Beside the account you want to download mail from, click on the “Check Mail Now” link
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