I wish I never hit the send button
Every day we send out lots of mails. I normally read a mail two times before sending it to a customer. And despite that, there have been times where I wished that a message had not gone out. Maybe I pressed the shortcut to send out the mail when it was half finished, maybe I got an afterthought on how to express something, or on how to solve an issue in another way, or to include someone in the conversation...
The other day, talking with one of our customers project manager, he told me he was going to send me a mail while we were at the phone. He told me that I would recieve the mail in one minute, and the curious thing: "one minute" was not an expression. I got interested in the delay, and just had to ask why. Basically he has a rule that delays all outgoing mail for one minute before submitting it to the server. He gave me a nice and easy solution I hadn't ever seen. You can cause a configurable delay to your outgoing messages with a very simple Outlook rule! Now you always have a second chance! After all the customer probably won't notice the delay.
I'm not saying that this is the remedy to all mistakes, but I don't know why, when you press the send button, a background process kicks in and you realize your mistakes, and this is a nice way of getting to the message before it really gets sent. Of course your brain can adapt to kick that background process in after the delay... you never know brains! ;)
I liked the solution because it was a way to use Outlook rules that I had never thought of, although you can see that it isn't hidden at all (create an outgoing message rule).
Oh... wait... I wanted to blog about open source things! I tried to get the same functionality out of Thunderbird but it seems that rules only apply to incoming mail. Does anybody know of an Open Source mail client that can implement this sort of behaviour?