Note that this package has been superseded by the superior mu4e-send-delay.

One of the things I missed when I switched from thunderbird to mu4e was the ability to undo sent emails. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has spotted a glaring error, or a CC’d person that shouldn’t be CC’d the moment after I hit send! Of course you can’t truly undo a sent email, but if you buffer emails for a short period of time before actually sending them then you can retrieve them and edit or cancel them before sending again. This is what the send later extension in thunderbird does, and also the “undo send” function in gmail.

I looked into whether something like this existed for mu4e, I found gnus-delay, but it turned out not to work in mu4e. However it did not take too much effort to modify it to work, and hence mu4e-delay was born. Credit to the authors of gnus-delay who wrote most of the code this is based on.

Once you initialise the package, you can use C-c C-l (mnemonic l for send later) in place of C-c C-c to send mail. This moves the mail to the drafts folder and adds a header keyword specifying the time at which a mail should be sent, defaulting to 2 minutes in the future. A timer runs every minute (default) checking all mails in the drafts folder and sending those that are due. If you wish to “undo send” just find it in the drafts folder and then edit it to remove the delay header and save it. This will prevent it from being sent until you re-send (or delay) it.

The package also provides the function mu4e-delay-add-delay-header which can be called interactively to add any date and time to the delay header keyword, scheduling an email for an arbitrary point in the future.

The mail is sent with smtpmail or sendmail/postfix depending on which you have configured with send-mail-function . Since smtpmail causes emacs to freeze while mail is sent, you are strongly encouraged to use postfix (or similar) to handle your email sending.

A known limitation of mu4e-delay is that attachments are not sent properly when the mail is delayed. I’ve not worked out why this is yet (suggestions welcome!). The package checks to see if you have an attachment and warns you about this. With attachments you currently need you use C-c C-c to send as normal.

I’ll finish with a word of caution. Emails are important and I’d hate you to get into trouble because something went wrong an email did not get sent. I strongly recommend (at least at first) setting the variables mu4e-delay-bcc-address to bcc all outgoing mail to a spare email address so you can check things are being sent correctly. You can also set mu4e-delay-backup-directory to backup all delayed mail to a given directory rather than deleting it. I have used this package for several months without problems, but be careful!

To install the package, download it from github and put the mu4e-delay.el file somewhere on your system and then add the following to your init.el file

( add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/directory" ) ( require ' mu4e-delay )

I’m keeping this package off MELPA for now until I get feedback that other people are using it without problems, so please let me know in the comments or on github whether it is working for you (or not).

My other articles on mu4e are collected here.