I used to. Now I write it in notepad and flog it through ChatGPT to ask it to make it sound nicer (because people at work take issue with my natural delivery).
I quite often type the message in notepad or Obsidian first, then paste into the email once I'm happy. A lot of the time, I'm replying to emails - so can't leave the to line empty because it's already populated.
I use GPGMail to sign all my emails, and it requires my PGP Key password so even if I accidentally hit 'Send' it won't until I enter the password. It has saved my 🥓 account number of times.
I do that with every email that is either very long or where I -- say -- vehemently disagree with something and need write all the hate down before I tame it in an edit pass.
That's why I'm both appreciative for *and* annoyed by the feature in outlook that automatically adds someone to the To list when you @ mention them in the body of the email 😅
Yes. And I also have a "Safety Net" rule in Outlook, that holds every sent email for 1 min in my Outbox before delivering it. That has saved me more times than I'm willing to admit :-)
That, and I put a one minute delay on emails leaving my outbox, so I can catch any mistakes that I am suddenly sure I made as soon as I hit the send button.
Nah. A long time ago I realized the To line was sometimes as important as the content itself. Having it filled out first would help me with the tone of the mail. My compensating control is to mash a bunch of random crap on the CC that won’t resolve and therefore won’t send.
That's a really good idea, to leave To line empty until ready to send.
And for me, "ready to send" on a long email, includes going back and putting a TL;DR summary at the top.
I almost sent a Very Important And Touchy Email wrong because I didn't do this a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, I was saved by an undo feature (the e-mail wasn't posted yet)... Not gonna make that mistake again anytime soon 😅
🙋♂️🙋♂️🙋♂️better safe than sorry! Wish Zoom had an option for that, at least 2 people in the office daily send messages prematurely just trying to finalize a Japanese conversion...
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I'll also remove all the to's from an email chain if it's going to be a long response.
I may have been burnt before
And for me, "ready to send" on a long email, includes going back and putting a TL;DR summary at the top.
I often even blank it out temporarily when I'm replying to an email with anything more than a quick sentence.
New one sends to herself until the last minute.
Only problem is the habit of @-ing, which I have come to like to pull attention to a particular email part.