Have you ever wanted to write an email message in Gmail now but send it a later date and time? Maybe you are sending birthday greetings and would like the email message to be delivered on the exact day. Or you have written an email now but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.
Microsoft Outlook has a built-in scheduler to help you delay the delivery of email messages. After you are finished writing an email message and hit the Send button, the message isn’t delivered immediately – it stays in your outbox and is sent at the specified date and time automatically.
Gmail doesn’t let you schedule a later delivery of email messages but there are browser extensions – like Boomerang, Sidekick and Right Inbox – that let you specify a future send date for your outgoing email messages. These are however subscription based services that allow you to send only a limited number of scheduled email messages for free per month. The other concern is privacy – you will have to grant read and write access to your entire Gmail account to a third-party to enable scheduling inside Gmail.
Schedule & Send Gmail Messages Later
If you are reluctant to provide access to your entire Gmail account to another service, there’s a good alternative – Google Sheets.
What you can do is compose all the emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail, let them stay as drafts and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in the Google sheet. The messages would be delivered automatically at the time chosen by you with Google Scripts.
The Gmail Scheduler is available in free and premium editions. The premium edition lets you schedule more emails, you can schedule recurring emails that are sent daily, weekly or monthly, it allows you to send mails from another alias associated with your Gmail account and you can also opt for one-on-one support.
| Features | Free | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Supports Gmail & Google Apps | Yes | Yes |
| Number of emails that you can schedule | ~20 | No limit |
| Schedule Recurring Emails | No | Yes |
| Change the sender’s email address (Gmail alias) | No | Yes |
| Logs scheduling activity for troubleshooting | No | Yes |
| Installation Manual (PDF) included | No | Yes |
| Support options | None | |
| Choose Edition | Forever Free | Premium You can buy the Premium version using your credit card or PayPal. It is a flat one-time fee (not a subscription) and you can use the program for life. You also get free technical support over email for 6 months. |
How to Setup Gmail Scheduler
Scheduling Gmail messages with Google sheets is easy. Here’s a detailed video tutorial (download) that will walk you through the steps for using Gmail scheduler.
Go to your Gmail mailbox and compose a few email messages that you would like to send later. Do not hit the Send button, just let these draft messages stay in the Drafts folder on your Gmail account.
Your draft messages can have rich formatting, you can add attachments, signatures and even inline images. Make sure that you have included the recipient’s email address in the TO field of the draft emails.
- Click here to make a copy of the Gmail Scheduler sheet in your Google Drive.
- Go to File – Spreadsheet Settings and select your current timezone from the dropdown. The emails will be scheduled in this timezone.
- Go to the Gmail Scheduler menu, select Authorize and grant the necessary permissions.
- Choose the Gmail Scheduler menu again and select Fetch Messages to import all the draft messages from your Gmail account into the Google Sheet.
- Set the scheduled date and time for individual messages in column D of the sheet. You can double-click a cell and use the date picker or you can manually enter the date and time as mm/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss in 24 hour format.
- Go to Gmail Scheduler -> Schedule Messages and run the scheduler. You can close the spreadsheet and it will send messages at the specified time automatically.
Please do note that once an email message has been scheduled, you should not edit the corresponding Gmail draft message else it will be removed from the queue. If you wish to edit the draft or need to change the delivery time once the messages have been scheduled, you can fetch the drafts again and reinitialize the queue.
The free edition of Gmail scheduler lets you schedule 10-20 email messages in one go. If you wish to schedule more messages, or if you are trying the schedule recurring email with Gmail, please get the premium edition.
The story, How to Schedule Gmail Messages with a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 25/06/2015 under GMail, Internet.
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