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!"
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.
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.
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?
Since Gmail has a bunch of google lab apps in the gmail settings, it might well happen....
As of many people replying they need a feature no one has - here's opportunity of creating a completely new web e-mail system :-).
I've never tried it, though.
$ at 8:00am sh -c 'mail person@normal-sleep-schedule.com < my_message.txt'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.
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.