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Comment by ryanspahn | Hacker News Reader

I'd prefer an option where I send it and it rests on gmail's server for X amount of time I specify (minutes, hours, days).

I could then go back to it and edit it at will or delete it before the send time has passed.

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I was going to say the same thing. I probably edit at least 50 percent of my comments here and on reddit within a minute, and delete about 25 percent. Presumably a pause in mail sending would have a similar effect.

Maybe we'll see this ... obviously we all thought of this feature before and would enjoy this. Maybe they are listening?

Also, if they are listening I would like to be able to Twitter within Gmail. Have an inbox tab and a Twitter tab; spend all my time in Gmail & refresh Twitter a few times a day, why not consolidate?

I saw the headline and had the exact same thought. "Oh, look, someone's invented that time-delay feature that I've wanted for years!"

That would have another use, too: hiding your sleep schedule from the recipient. You could write an email at 3:00 AM, set an 8 hour delay, and appear to have regular sleep patterns.

Or vice versa. From "The Dilbert Principle":

If you wake up in the middle of the night to heed nature’s call, take a moment to leave a voicemail message for your boss. Your message will automatically leave a recorded time-stamp, thus reinforcing the illusion that you work around the clock. This is a big improvement over reality -- that you chugged a beer before going to bed.

This is easy enough to do on a UNIX machine. Compose your message, then delay the sending with at:

    $ at 8:00am sh -c 'mail person@normal-sleep-schedule.com < my_message.txt'

Unless you want to delay it until birthdays or some other event that's weeks or months away.

at lets you specify dates as day/month/year. All you have to do is make sure the computer is running at that time, which is easy if you do this on your mail server.

That I know. I would never depend on a command line command to execute something months from now. Not on any system.

I want this so bad. I've looked before, but I can't find this feature anywhere.

But rather than setting delays I'd like to just define a range (say 8am–6pm) during which mail is sent. Anything outside that range would be queued until the next period.

Not that I use it, but I'm sure Outlook or any other POP mail suite offers scheduling.

BTW, I thought about similar feature - setting a desired reply date/time on e-mails you send, so the recipients MUA can automatically schedule it in users calendar (and/or remind him of replying you).

As of many people replying they need a feature no one has - here's opportunity of creating a completely new web e-mail system :-).

Something like this? http://www.addins4outlook.com/sendguard/

I've never tried it, though.

As always, the same two questions.

1) How to build it? (server-based or client-based) and 2) Who's going to pay for it?

It sounds like one of those things that a small number of people talk passionately about but there's not actually any money in making their pain go away. Or maybe -- beats the heck out of me where the payback is.

Client-side this is less than a week on the Microsoft platform -- a month if you want to handle all email clients. Server-side? I think you'd have to pick just one mail host and stick to customizing it.

One of the issues would be turning it off -- you'd have to have some kind of neato keypad test thingy to prevent drunken farts from just clicking the button and sending anyway. That leads me to believe a better design might be client-side.

It could be implemented as a variation on "saved drafts".

Since Gmail has a bunch of google lab apps in the gmail settings, it might well happen....

http://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs

How about sending your message to a kind of delaying-mail-proxy server could help?

Please pardon my garbled post. It's been too late.

That's a nice one. Didn't think about that. It's a nice compromise between client and server solutions.

Store-and-forward has another big set of issues though. File sizes and bandwidth requirements are easily non-trivial. In addition, there could be legal issues with keeping the data around for awhile and then forwarding that wouldn't exist if you just piggy-backed on some other app. In a way, it kind of puts you in the league with GMail and the other guys, right?

Totally agree.

Maybe it could be a greasemonkey-added "Send later..." button that you have to manually click on every time (to avoid thinking you sent an email, but it was actually put into a queue) along with an input box for delay-time.

When you click it, it could (1) add a unique identifier to the subject, (2) save the email in drafts, and (3) send a message to a server-side app (which knows your Gmail authentication info) with the ID of the message and the time it should be sent. Then at the appropriate time this app logs in, finds message by unique ID, gets rid of said ID, and sends the message.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is defining X before you send the email.

Let me put it this way: During the normal weekday, a 15 minute delay is probably sufficient. But coming home late on a Friday night, is 15 hours enough? Or, in some cases, 15 days?

So that's the question: how to define X ahead of time without knowing all conditions for which X applies? I suppose you could have date/time conditionals, but there would be instances where you probably violate your own rules.

Heh, let it depend on how many maths questions you get right.

I agree. However this might not be as effective as one would expect if you usually realize your mistake only once you're past the point of no-return.

In other words, if you know your mail won't be sent right away, will that delay the background, subconscious mental process of analysing your actions to see if you screwed up?

exactly the approach i would have taken and i think their solution demonstrates, to some degree, what can happen when a company is focused on hiring engineers instead of great product people.

Let's not argue too much. I agree that what you say is true, but I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. Think back 30 years. Product people were thinking up new main frames, researchers were thinking up the Eldorado workstation, and hackers were thinking up personal computers.

Our industry has really benefited from a "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" mentality. Is this a good feature? I don't know, but I do like the idea of Google inventing 100 or 1,000 such features and seeing if one of them is a winner.

I am not so sure that a product management team with a gating and evaluation process will do a better job of picking features than--no offense googlers--a million monkeys randomly inventing features they think are neat-o.

Totally agree. And I'm sure I read Paul Buchheit somewhere saying that just this feature would make a good addition to Gmail.

What they did instead is so gimmicky it makes me cringe.

I've been asking for this for years to no avail. Even a ten-second delay would be enough to prevent a lot of "sender's remorse".

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