Some people angst and anguish about drafting the perfect reply to an email, especially if the email asks for something specific e.g. "Hi, can you send me exactly 110 words, describing how the project you are working on will benefit unemployed people between the ages of 20 and 30? No hurry, in your own time"

Now some people can just spend 2 minutes typing in the 100 words and press send, and then move on to more productive things like tweaking the code to their Trump mention counter script on the halfbakery.

But some people will open the email to reply, and brain freeze, and writers block, and draft, and delete, and copy and paste, and check the grammar, and realise they are over the word count, and worry about which sentence could be deleted, and have a little panic, and decide that the passive voice might be better for this, and change it all, and then realise it was better how it was before, and change everything back, and then realise that they had accidentally deleted a great phrase in the changes, and try to remember what it was, and type it in, and worry that thay had not remembered correctly, and start to think that perhaps all this editing is not good, and whether it would be better to delete everything and start fresh with a blank page. Meanwhile they realise that it is already dinner time and they were meant to be meeting their Aunty Aspatria for dinner, and so they save it as draft so they can carry on working on their reply tomorrow.

This invention helps these people.

When you hit "reply" or "new message", there is a little pull down thing beside the "send" button. You can pull it down as far as you want, calibrated in time. from 1 minute to 1 hour. So suppose you pull it down to the 10 minute mark. Well it starts ticking (optionally playing a suitable soundtrack like the Countdown theme tune). At the end of the time period the email sends, with whatever text is in it at the point of sending. If you finish early then you can still hit "send" and it goes at once.
-- pocmloc, Apr 06 2022

I'm more in favor of the opposite approach, wherein you can delete or edit your message long after it's been sent. No idea why Googles doesn't do this, unless I have no idea and it does.
-- 4and20, Apr 06 2022


Yeah I need the opposite approach, where the process of hitting 'send' instantly coaxes hidden dark reaches of my brain into working and I realize I wanted to add / edit / attach something and I can hit 'cancel.'
-- RayfordSteele, Apr 07 2022



random, halfbakery