Sending Email into the Future

September 20, 2005 6:31 PM

I want to send emails on a timer. Help!

I want to be able to post new content to my blog during work hours. Blogger allows you to post via email. What I want to do is to be able to send emails at midnight and have them be delivered (and thus posted) at noon and 2pm, say, the next day. Outlook 2000 claims it can send messages delivered no earlier than a certain time, but it's not recognizing me as a sender (also, I'd like to be able to close up my laptop while I'm at work). Is there some easy hack or application that will let me do this? I have a GMail account, a Yahoo account, and an old college email webmail account but none of them seem to have this option. I checked out that "FutureMe" site but it doesn't have the option to set more than a delivery date.

(Please don't just say "post from your work computer." It's a government machine and my boss and coworkers know about the blog. I plan to announce whatever tech solution I use so they know that I am not blogging on government time.)

posted by amber_dale to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Get a shell account somewhere, use cron and sendmail. You might be able to work it out on windows, but believe me, unix is easier by far.
posted by devilsbrigade at 6:34 PM on September 20, 2005

Eudora will do it. Hold shift and click send, and it will ask when you would like to schedule the delivery for each email. Works well, when I've used it.
posted by tomble at 6:47 PM on September 20, 2005

The term is "email scheduler" or "email scheduling" which will help while googling. I don't have experience with any of them, but perhaps someone else does.
posted by fionab at 8:10 PM on September 20, 2005

I assume you're going to send these emails before you go to work? Well, if you don't use Eudora, that seems like an intensive workaround when other blog apps (Movable Type, for one) will let you do future posting. (You put it in, it publishes later, time of your choice.) You're jerry-rigging dear old Blogger when you really don't have to.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 8:30 PM on September 20, 2005

http://www.emailschedule.com/

I can't vouch for it, though.
posted by Asef Jil at 8:47 PM on September 20, 2005

Argh. It works, but there's signature spam.

___________________________
This email was sent to you by Asef Jil with our Email Scheduler service.
Register now at http://www.emailschedule.com
posted by Asef Jil at 9:07 PM on September 20, 2005

Yeah, my TypePad blog does this, and it's integrated. How easy would it be to swich from Blogger to TypePad, if this is a killer feature for you?
posted by fionab at 9:24 PM on September 20, 2005

http://www.futureme.org/

Again, can't vouch for it.
posted by blag at 4:07 AM on September 21, 2005

I have a blog template I really like, and most people link to the blogspot address, but if switching to Eudora doesn't work I may have to contemplate Typepad. Phooey.
posted by amber_dale at 6:17 AM on September 21, 2005

I use blat, which is a command-line utility to send emails and schedule it to execute whenever I need it to.
posted by callmejay at 8:22 AM on September 21, 2005