Scheduling deferred sending of emails

Sébastien Hinderer Sebastien.Hinderer at ens-lyon.org
Sat Jul 29 10:07:37 UTC 2023


Dear all,

I would like to be able to respond to emails quickly to have it done but
defer the actual sending of the response to slow down conversations.
Ideally at the moment of sending I would specify a date and time after
which I am fine with the mail being sent. For example, I respond to an
email on Friday afternoon but can express that I want it to be actually
sent anytime after next Monday 9pm. That could be by adding a special
header to the email or by responding to questions at send time, I don't
mind and it's not really the usesr interface I'd like to discuss here.

What I rather would like to discuss is rather whether and how this could
be implemented in the MUA/MTA framework mutt belongs to. I believe that
more integrated solutions like Thunderbird do have such scheduled
deferred sending features, but I have no idea how this can be achieved in
presence of both an MUA and an MTA because the feature seems to be at
the interface between the two: there needs to be a way for the MUA to
tell the MTA about the deferred sending and of course the MTA does not
only need to undestand it, it also needs to actually implement it.

I had a superficial look to exim4 which I use as an MTA but didn't find
anything related, but perhaps my search has been too shallow.

I also considered adding another MTA between mutt and Exim4 which would
keep the deferred mails until the scheduled date and pass them to Exim4
only at that moment but it felt a bit a pity to have to use one
dedicated software component just for that as, I assume, it would
widely resemble a traditional MTA, having a lot in common with it.

Any idea will be more than welcome.

Best wishes,

Seb.


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