To make delayed/planned sending of emails possible

[erique]

To make delayed/planned sending of emails possible

[Russn8r]

Send later button needs to immediately let you schedule WHEN to send automatically.
I don't see any option to schedule it even after I had to go to help to find out it was stuck in the outbox.

[Jon]

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

[dieten2]

Dear Erique, the idea is good. There is already an add-on doing exactly this.
best Ferdinand

[rpedrica]

Here is the link to the addon:

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/send-later-3/

[Anonymous_14563]

It will be useful to be able to schedule the sending of an email on a specific date , later and schedule this calendar bis as soon as the email is written.

[Jon]

(Note: a similar idea has been merged into this thread)

[Jon]

Hey all,

Quick update…

This idea is now a “Trending idea” here on Mozilla Connect, which means it’s one step closer to reaching our internal teams for review—learn more about The Idea Journey.

Please keep the conversation going and stay tuned for updates 😃

[S2000]

There may already be add-ons to send an e-mail at a later date, but I don't think this functionality is so far-removed from what we would expect as basic or standard for writing emails.

If Gmail and Outlook offer this natively, Thunderbird should also do it, and it might even be beneficial for those who have e-mail providers or clients that do not support such an (important) feature.

[Seamaiden]

It would be nice to have more options in Thunderbird to send emails later, whether a global option or a per email option. Being able to schedule (delay) sending of an email until a specific calendar date, as one user suggested above, would definitely be a plus.

A few people mentioned the "Send Later" extension. Let me clarify a few things about that. The extension has a few limitations that are not obvious to new users.

1) To effectively use this extension, you should remove the default "Send" button from the toolbar of your compose window. Why? Because clicking on Send from the compose window sends the email IMMEDIATELY and bypasses Send Later, with one exception.

(If in the extension options for Send Later, you checked the box for "Send" does "Send Later," then clicking on the default Send button in the compose window delays the sending of the message automatically by the number of minutes you indicated previously in the extension's settings.)

2) If you know you want to send a message later and do not have "Send" does "Send Later" configured in the extension's options, then to send a message later, you must click the File menu in the compose window, select Send Later, and then enter time time to send it and other restrictions, which you will see in the popup window.

3) In the extension's options, you can check the box for "Send" delays messages for ___ minutes OR the box for "Send" does "Send Later," but not both.

[ThomasEi]

Gmail and Outlook are mentioned as examples, but these are interfaces to a server infrastructure, not mail clients. I do not see  a resonable way that TB could handle a scheduled send without knowing when my Laptop will be online (again). Perhaps with a bunch of requirements about the mail server which makes it hardly usable. So, I'd vote not to invest time here.

[TU12]

The Send Later extension presents a complicated dialog window that must be reviewed, configured & submitted for every outgoing message.  This is far more complex (and annoying) than what we actually need:

What we really want is a toggle in preferences that (when enabled) puts all outgoing messages into the Outbox by default when you press the “Send” button in the message composition window, so outgoing mail is only transmitted when you fetch incoming mail with the Get Messages button.  The functionality that I am describing here is (or was) a feature of Microsoft Outlook, and that is the feature from Outlook we miss the most.  (The only reason we switched to Thunderbird is that we want the ability to migrate mail user profiles between OS platforms as needed.)

In our application, the purpose of not sending mail immediately is to facilitate group collaboration: when several people are working on a related project and you need to reply to them all, sometimes you need to add user-specific instructions to one or more recipients, and may not realize this until you have read all new messages for the day. If you have already transmitted a message, you cannot add something to it. When all of the outgoing mail from the current session is held in the Outbox, you can amend messages to individual group members as needed.  Since we NEVER schedule messages to be sent at a particular time, the Send Later extension is a nuisance which adds unnecessary steps to our workflow and creates the potential for misconfiguration by users.

[ashtreex]

This is very important, these days one tries not to send business emails at weekends or out of hours. I tried the add on, it didn't work very well, a test email to me also sent a completely unrelated one from way back. Can't risk that happening.

[kidkaroo]

The Send Later extension no longer works on Thunderbird 115. Not having this option is enough of a dealbreaker to force me to revert to version 114.

[MattAuSupport]

Just like to point out for those wanting basic send later function to place mail in the outbox the keystroke is Ctrl+shift+Enter.

[ayu]

I know that it's difficult to implement true send later functionality without dedicated servers, but I would love it if the next time I am online and during work hours, thunderbird automatically sends my outbox emails. I think this should be easier to implement since thunderbird has similar functionality already for going online.

Another alternative would be to allow users to send all emails in outbox using cli commands. This would enable users to create a simple cron job to automate sending emails during specific hours.