That’s in contrast to online email services which are always connected to the Internet and can send out emails at any time providing they offer the ability to schedule emails which the most popular (Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) do not at this time. There are however third party services that can be used in this case.

Microsoft Outlook on the other hand makes it dead simple to schedule emails. All the user needs to do is to create a new email message, switch to the Options menu at the top of the screen and click on the delay delivery button under More Options in the ribbon.

This will open a new menu with the option to define a delivery data and time. Microsoft Outlook will not send out the email before the specified date. It will send out the email as soon as possible once the date and time is reached which is usually instantly if the computer is on and Outlook open.

The menu needs to be closed afterwards. The email can now be written as usual and send out. Outlook will recognize the date the email is scheduled and put it in the Outbox for the time being.

That’s however not a practical solution in most cases. Robert Sparnaaij outlined another solution. The Microsoft Outlook macro that he provides on his website can be used to save all images of an email in their original format. His macro adds two combined options to Microsoft Outlook: Saving all images of an email in their original format.

Outlook users have to create the macro by themselves. The process is outlined on the author’s homepage and should not take more than a few minutes even for inexperienced users. The macro will be added as a button to the Microsoft Outlook toolbar from where it can be pressed to open a save dialog window which will save all images of the active email in their original format on the computer system. The macro is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007.

Two of the features added by the Outlook add-on are reminders that check each email message when the user clicks the send button in the email program. The first reminder will check if a subject line has been added to the email. If that is not the case it will display a small popup window notifying the user of the missing subject line. The user then has the option to cancel sending the email to go back into editing mode and add a subject line or send the email anyway.

The second reminder will look for keywords in the email body that suggest that an attachment should have been added to the email message. If it finds a keyword but not attachment it will notify the user as well.

The last feature that is added by the Microsoft Outlook 2007 Essentials add-in is the ability to print a selection of the email message. This is done by right-clicking an email, selecting Outlook Essentials Mail Viewer, selecting the part of the email to be printed and right-clicking again to print the selection.

The Microsoft Outlook add-in might be useful for some users who either want to be extra careful to never forget to add attachments and subject lines to their email messages or who want to have the option to print a selection of emails.

It is not seldom that ten or more messages have been send back and forth each containing duplicate content from previous emails. Microsoft’s Outlook Thread Compressor has been designed specifically to reduce the size of the Outlook mailboxes by removing unnecessary emails from a thread. That’s right, the tool will delete emails in Outlook. This leads to a very important word of caution: It is advised to create a backup of the Microsoft Outlook email folder before you start using the program. While it has been designed and tested carefully one cannot be cautious enough when it comes to programs like this.

There are a few rules that will keep Outlook Thread Compressor (via Technospot) from deleting mails. It will ignore emails containing attachments as it does not come with the means to compare the attachments as well. Another limitation is that it is only effective on internal mail as it uses the conversation threading properties that are preserved for Outlook Exchange messages.

The user can select an Outlook folder that should be processed by the program. The mails can be moved to another folder instead of being deleted right away which is another way of testing the program’s functionality. A list of exceptions can be filled to have certain email messages never deleted by the Outlook compression program.

Installation is a bit complex and requires administrator privileges. It is outlined at the program’s homepage. The program – although not actively developed for more than six years works with all versions of Microsoft Outlook that have been released after Windows 2000. It is also compatible with both Windows Vista and Windows 7.