Give Thunderbird for Android a "send later" function

[52fighters]

The "send later" function is in a LOT of Android email programs. It is a part of basic functionality. Thunderbird for Android needs it too.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[Cycloneblaze]

I think this would be a bit difficult, because something needs to be online to actualy send the message when you scheduled it. Gmail and Outlook can do this because they control the mail servers as well as the client, so you can request a scheduled email and the server will take care of sending it for you. Most mail servers don't support this. Thunderbird only controls the client, and it allows you to use email accounts with arbitrary servers, so it can't know if asking the server to schedule the email will actually do anything.

You could have the Thunderbird client (app) take care of sending the email, silently in the background at the time you requested. The main problem I see is that if your phone was turned off or not connected to the internet, the send would fail until you got back online. It might be difficult to communicate that to users; you could use a notification, but a lot of the time the user wouldn't be actually looking at their phone at the send time, because they think they don't need to be - the email was "already" sent.

Anyone else know of other general-purpose Android email apps which have this feature and how they make it work? Do the Gmail or Outlook apps support it for non-Gmail or Outlook email accounts, or just their own?

[Sonja]

Schedule email later that day

I cannot find the "button" to schedule a written email to be send later that day or the next day. (This is possible in Outlook) I hear you thinking why don't you use Outlook? Because of how many space this app takes on my phone and it is very slow.

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)

[ankokudaishogun]

@CycloneblazeI'm a believer of User Responsibility. 
Just let the Users chose after telling them.

There are three options:

1. send the message at the first chance after the scheduled time, no matter how muh time passed. 
2. send the message at the first chance in a range of time(Example: scheduled between 15:30 and 16:00) and do not send it otherwise. A notification of sort would be necessary to warn the user obviously.
3. send the message at the scheduled time and do not send it if otherwise.

...which technically are actually all the same Option #2 with a different end-range.

If anything the issue might be in detecting the actual online status of the phone, but I suppose there are API for that.  
It would tie-up nicely with Idea 75075: Thunderbird Mobile: Offline warning as they'd rely on the same events