Did you know that you can change certain options for a sent email in Outlook? Those options can be very helpful for some users in specific context.
Out of default, Outlook has specific settings that are always applied during sending an email. Those are often the most commonly used options, but not always. By modifying those for a specific email you are sending, you can control a lot more and make it fit more nicely to your needs.
For example, if you want the email to be automatically delivered to the recipient in future and not immediately after you send.
You can also change the address on which the reply to your sent email will be sent to, rather than the address using which you sent the email in the first place. This can be helpful if you want the replies for a certain kind of emails to be sent only to the support staff in your company.
So, let’s see how to do all that:
Firstly, to create a new message, go to “New Email” on the Home tab of the ribbon. Or you can also press Ctrl + N key when the focus is on Outlook Mail section.
Then, inside the window where you compose a new email message, go to ‘Options’ tab on the Outlook ribbon at the top.
Here, you will find all kinds of different options available to modify the mail you are sending: Themes and colors, page color, BCC enabled/disabled, Encryption, voting buttons, delivery/read report, address to reply to, and more.
Also note that if you cannot find the option to add recipients in BCC field (the one that will be hidden from other recipients), it is because Outlook has turned if off by default. But you can turn it back on from the ‘Options’ tab.
Let’s talk about the two most helpful options for the sent email you would like to learn:
How to delay a deliver for an email
Say, for example, you have the finished the report that your manager asked for, who works in a different time zone. You want the report to be sent early morning according to the time zone of your manager. However, you need to be somewhere else now or need to sleep or for any other reason, you cannot access your mail after a few hours. What you can do is send an email now but control the delivery time for it whenever you want, so that your manager will see it exactly when you want.
To set this up:
Click on ‘Delay Delivery’ option inside the “more options” group.
You will get a new “Properties” window. Here, set the time when you want the email to be delivered. Simple as that. You do not need to do anything again to finally send the email yourself. But if you want, you can even stop from delivering it altogether, in case you want to make some corrections at the last minute.
To change the “reply to” address:
Say, for instance, you do not think there is any need to read the replies for an email you are sending. That is more of a task for your support team. You can simply change the “reply to” address so that if any of the readers replies to it, your support team will get the email instead.
To set this up, click on “Direct Replies to” and then enter the email address inside “Have replies sent to” field.
You can add more than one email address, separated by a comma.
There are more options to control how you send an email and the behavior of the sent email. We will discuss that some other time. But we hope the advice above has helped you in delaying the delivery of your email and changing the address on which the replies will be sent to.