It happens: you send a personal message to the wrong recipient, you realize too late that you made a horrible typo in an email to an executive, you clicked Reply All when you really meant to Reply.

If you’re lucky, the conditions will be right to recall the message using Outlook. But it’s possible–even likely–that you won’t be able to recall the message before it’s seen by the recipient.

You’re most likely to realize your mistake within the first few moments after sending. Prevent these “oops!” moments by creating a rule to delay your outbound messages by one or two (or more) minutes. That way, you can modify or delete your outgoing email and correct the mistake.

Follow the instructions in the video above, or:

1. Click the File tab.
2. Select Manage Rules and Alerts.
3. Click New Rule.
4. Under Start from a Blank Rule, click Apply rule on messages I send. Click Next.
5. Skip the screen for selecting conditions, and click Next. Click Yes in the dialog box that appears to apply the new rule to messages you send.
6. Select defer delivery by a number of minutes.
7. In the box below, click the phrase number of and enter your desired delay. (We recommend 1-5 minutes.)
8. Click OK.
9. Click Next.
10. Enter a name for the rule, and keep the Turn on this rule box checked.
11. Click Finish.

Bear in mind that this is a “client-only” rule. Rather than being applied at the Exchange Server level, this rule is applied to the Outlook 2013/2016 client while it is running only. So if you send messages from the web, a mobile device, or anywhere other than Outlook 2013/2016, the rule will not be applied.