Four More Outlook Tip for Writers

Here are a few more things I forgot in my recent post on tips for using Microsoft Outlook:

• Send Email in the Future Sometimes you need to remember to send an email in the future. It might be a second or third follow-up email that you don't want to send yet, having just launched a message. Perhaps you realized today that you need to send someone a reminder a week from now. Whatever the reason, when you've written the email and before you've sent it off, click the Options button. Check off Do not deliver before and provide a date. Now the email will sit in your outbox until the day it's supposed to go. After that, the next time you send and receive, the message will be on its way.


• Get a Receipt Another feature of the Options button is the ability to request a receipt for delivery and/or when the recipient actually reads the message. This won't always work; some people won't allow receipts to go out, but sometimes it works. I find that getting a receipt on delivery works better, because generally the receiving email server can do that without getting permission from a user (if it's set up to do so at all, which not all are).


• Set Importance Another choice on Options (and available is setting low or high importance (instead of normal). You may have seen this on receiving emails that seem to have a little red exclamation point - that's an "important" one. I think the importance button should be called the PR minion button.


• Automating Send/Receive if You want mail to go in and out on a given schedule and don't want to think further about it, go to Tools/Options. Click on the Mail Setup tab and click the Send/Receive button. Check the first Schedule an automatic send/receive every and pick the amount of time between send/receive cycles. Look a bit farther down and you'll see a second such check box. That lets you have Outlook go online to send and receive on a regular schedule even when Outlook isn't online.