You’ve written the email message and just as you hit the the Send button you spot a spelling mistake. You click on the Outbox to try and retrieve the message but it’s too late. The email has been sent.

How many times has this happened to you? Or perhaps even worse. You’ve sent the message and then 30 seconds later started to regret something you wrote. Again it’s too late.

But there is a way round this. I use it on my Outlook email set up and it’s saved my bacon a number of times.

With Outlook you can set up rules to apply to a message depending on conditions that you specify. I have simply set up a rule that says if any message sent has normal priority, delay it for 2 minutes. If the message has high priority then send it straight away.

When I send a message it sits in my Outbox for 2 minutes unless I specifically allocate it high priority, in which case it’s sent immediately. This means that when I spot that spelling mistake after I’ve hit the Send button, I can go to the Outbox, retrieve the message and edit it.

Set up the rule as follows in Outlook (I’m using Outlook 2003 but other versions are similar).

• In the Tools drop-down click Rules and Alerts.
• In the window that opens up click New Rule.
• Another window opens and in that one check Start from a blank rule.
• From here just follow the Wizard and set up the rule.

That’s all there is to it. If you’ve never used rules in Outlook before, try setting up other rules. For example, you can set up rules to filter incoming mail where you can set up a rule such that incoming mail from a specific person is moved into a specific folder. You can set up as many rules as you like.