Delay receiving emails from one contact during specific time of day?

November 11, 2016 1:41 PM

For a number of reasons I want a way to delay the delivery of emails from a specific contact to my email client during a two hour period every day. I want whatever system to be automatic and don't want the emails discarded; just held until the set time has passed, and then they can be delivered. Is what I want impossible?
posted by theNonsuch to Technology (4 answers total)

what is your email client?
posted by brainmouse at 1:44 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

The email client I use doesn't have anything like this available. But it occurred to me when I checked that one work-around might be to set up a rule to have emails from this person forwarded to a different email account and deleted, and then check that account at the time you prefer.

Another option would be to have the messages filtered, and marked as read, into a specific folder or mailbox. Then you could manually check it at your preferred time. You wouldn't be notified when they arrived, which might be enough for your purposes.
posted by Orlop at 2:49 PM on November 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you use gmail, it looks like you might be able to do something hacky with the snooze feature in inbox.
posted by o0dano0o at 3:01 PM on November 11, 2016

This really depends on your e-mail infrastructure & client. I just checked my copy of Outlook and there doesn't appear to be a way to have rules only be active for a time frame during each day. As Orlop says, you could definitely have a rule that shunts all messages from a sender to a folder and furthermore you could write some Outlook VBA to have a scheduled job that always pushes messages from that folder to your Inbox except during your "quiet period". The trouble with this is that this likely only works with the client and not with the web ui or mobile interfaces.
posted by mmascolino at 6:43 AM on November 12, 2016