Ever fire off an email and then immediately regret it after you hit the “Send” button? Perhaps you forgot to add the attachment. Maybe you didn’t include a key point. Maybe you said something really stupid or mean. Did you forget to CC someone on the mail?

Regardless of the circumstances, we’ve all done it. We’ve all experienced send regret.

Here’s a tip for people using Outlook and want to minimize the send regret phenomenon:

Uncheck the box for Send immediately when connected.

In Outlook 2007 this is found under Tools » Options… » Mail Setup.

Unselecting this box will not send your email as soon as you hit the send button but rather wait until your next scheduled Send/Receive cycle (I think the default cycle is to Send/Receive every 15 minutes but this can be changed).

I did this a few weeks ago and have already been saved 2 or 3 times.

Additionally, I used to have my email client check for mail every 5 minutes but I recently changed it to every 30 minutes. When you receive the volume of mail that I do, the constant interruptions to check mail every five minutes was killing productivity.

Now, by only checking mail every 30 minutes I am able to concentrate on projects for longer periods of time without being interrupted by mail. In fact I’d like to maybe move it up to 2 hours.

I briefly checked Gmail but didn’t see an option to change Send/Receive time on that. Not to say it doesn’t exist, I just didn’t see it right away. Also, don’t know about Yahoo!, Hotmail or any other web-mail clients.

How about you? Any email tips you’d like to share?