John Gully's Blog  { technology tips, tricks and errata; }

How many times have you clicked Send on an email only to regret it moments later?  There is no undo in email, but if you are using Microsoft Outlook here's the next best thing.

Fire up Outlook, and from the Tools menu select Rules and Alerts.  From the "Rules and Alerts" window click the New Rule button.

Select the last template in the list, Check messages after sending and click the Next button.

This rule does not require anything conditions from the "Which condition(s) do you want to check" step so just click the Next button again.  You will be warned that "The rule will apply to every message you send" click Yes when prompted.

On the "What do you want to do with the message" step select the last option in the list "defer delivery by a number of minutes".  Click on "a number of" and specify how long to wait before sending messages, and click the Next button. 

 

At the "Are there any exceptions" step check the "except if it is marked as importance" option.  Click on "importance" and select "High" from the drop-down list and click the Next button.

Finally at the "Finish rule setup" step name the rule "Delay outgoing messages for 5 minutes" or something that provides you similar understanding of the rule.  Click the Finish button to complete the rule.

That's it!  Now any new email you create will remain in the Outlook outbox for 5 minutes before being sent.  This should give you enough time to edit a message if you decide you have made a mistake. 

Don't worry about setting the delay to less than 5 minutes, or turning off the rule for time-sensitive email.  If you have something urgent simply mark it as a message of high importance and it will be sent immediately, bypassing any delay.

I have been using Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a few months now and have been quite pleased with it's performance and manageability.  The server is used primarily to replicate environments for clients that would otherwise require a lot of different hardware to support. 

When the server was recently upgraded I discovered that our virtual machines were not configured to start automatically.  Although this seems like a simple configuration there are a few tricks that alluded me at first.

Here are the steps required to have a virtual machine start up automatically when the Virtual Server host starts:

There are two of these steps in particular that were confusing for me.  The first being the requirement to use a specified username and password.  As I understand it, a virtual machine is run under the permissions of the user who starts it.  By specifying a user account you are specifying are essentially telling Virtual Server which account to use when this process is automated.  For more information read this TechNet article.

The second confusion was setting the "Action when Virtual Server" stop to "Shut down guest OS".  This was originally set to "Save State" but this setting will not resume the guest OS loses power, as the virtual machine's state was never saved.  If you stick with "Shot down guest OS" you should avoid any potential problems.