Overview

This package is intended mainly to provide the functionality of adding a delay to the sending of an email so that the email can be retrieved and edited before it is really sent. This is equivalent to the “send later” extension in thunderbird, or the “undo send” option in gmail. The package also supports scheduling of emails to be send at a specific date and time.

The code is based closely on gnus-delay, and adds a header specifying a time at which to send the email. The mail is then saved to the user’s draft folder. A scheduled process runs (every minute by default) and checks all mails in the draft folder and sends any that are due.

The function mu4e-delay-add-delay-header adds the delay header and can be called interactively to add delay times in different formats. More usefully, one would replace the normal send function in mu4e with mu4e-delay-send which adds the default delay of 2 minutes (customised with mu4e-delay-default-delay) and then saves the message to the draft folder and buries the message buffer, giving the user the impression of having sent the message. This is bound to C-c C-l (mnemonic: l for send later) by default, so just use that instead of C-c C-c to send your email.

The function mu4e-delay-send-delayed-mails loops over all mails in the draft folder looking for the delay header. This runs on a timer every minute by default (customised with mu4e-delay-default-timer). If any messages are due to be sent then it sends them. The messages are checked with the function mu4e-delay-check-file-and-send-if-due which sends any due mail. Mail can be sent with smtpmail-send-it or sendmail-sent-it (given by the value of send-mail-function). Sendmail is much preferred as smtpmail-send-it runs synchronously so will interrupt (briefly, but annoyingly) whatever you are doing when the timer runs and it finds mail to send. For more invisible use, configure a version of sendmail on your system and set up mu4e to use that.

Undo send

A delayed email is easily recovered by finding it in the draft folder and then editing it and removing the delay header and saving it. This will prevent it from being sent until you re-send (or delay) it.

Limitations

A known limitation is that attachments are not sent properly when the mail is delayed. I’ve not worked out why this is yet! The package checks to see if you have an attachment and warns you about this.

Warning

Emails are important and I’d hate you to get into trouble because something went wrong and e.g. a mail did not get sent. I strongly recommend (at least at first) setting the variables mu4e-delay-bcc-address to bcc all outgoing mail to a spare email address so you can check things are being sent ok. You can also set mu4e-delay-backup-directory to backup all delayed mail to a given directory rather than deleting it. I have used this package for several months without problems, but be careful!

Quick start

Put the mu4e-delay.el file somewhere on your system and then add the following to your init.el file

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/directory")
(require 'mu4e-delay)

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