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I am having an interesting problem to solve. We want to be able to delay the delivery of certain business emails sent from some managers to their staff after business hours to the next working day. These messages would need to be queued somewhere and then released at the start of the day. To complicate matters further, while there is no, strictly speaking, shift work, the different staff members have different schedules - some may be working 7-4, and some 10-7. The manager in question sometimes works 6 am to 2 am next day and doesn't want to disturb their staff after hours.

I know there is an option to send the delayed email in Outlook, but it has to be manually enabled for each message and involves quite a few clicks (click the button to open the dialog box, tick the delay box, click to open the date/time prompt etc) and is unreliable.

I have found a VBA script here which looks like it should work at the first glance, but it's a client-side solution and would only work if Outlook is running, and won't cover emails sent from the phone. And setting up or changing the rules will be quite cumbersome.

I wonder if there is a more polished solution that can achieve the same result?

Draco-S
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Based on my research and knowledge, to delay a email, we could use the delivery option, vba and rule in Outlook to realize it, but they couldn't apply as global settings to other clients(e.g. OWA, Mobile devices), and there seems be no settings in Exchange Server too.

However, according to the official documentation How to: Delay sending an email message by using the EWS Managed API 2.0, you could use EWS to realize the delay feature. Here is a thread for your reference, which is related with the delay feature and EWS: Delay Mail Sending .

Ivan_Wang
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  • This is an API, only useful if you are sending emails from a third-party app programmatically. It does not apply to Outlook, OWA or ActiveSync. – Draco-S Sep 08 '20 at 22:27
  • @Draco-S Thanks for your knowledge. If so, as **Ed Crowley** said, there're no settings in Exchange Server to delay emails from all types of client access. – Ivan_Wang Sep 10 '20 at 02:28