Send Later

[reido2012]

Hi,

I've been using Neomutt as my primary email client for a couple months now and I would like to contribute.

I came from an email client that had a very handy feature called 'Send Later'. Most email clients have this feature now so I thought it would be a great addition.

This feature allows a user to schedule an email to be sent at a later date.

How I think it could work

On the email compose/confirmation page you have the option to 'Send Later'.

When you select 'Send Later' there are two options for getting the time and date to send the email:

1. Allow natural language input of a date and time that we parse using a library like dateparser (if there's a similar one in C)

2. Provide a set of options at fixed time

   • If it's currently morning
     • This afternoon
     • This evening
     • Tomorrow morning
   • If it's currently afternoon
     • This evening
     • Tomorrow morning
     • Tomorrow afernoon
   • If it's currently evening
     • Tomorrow morning
     • Tomorrow afternoon
     • Tomorrow evening

When the time is confirmed by the user we:

1. Tag the email with time it should be sent X-Schedule:<datetime>
2. We move the email to a dedicated mailbox/folder called "Scheduled"

We have a background process that scans the "Scheduled" folder

This process will move an email to the outbox to be sent as normal when the time on the email tag is the same or less than the current date time.

This is my first trying to contribute to an open source project so I'm very open to suggestions.

I'm curious to hear if other people are also interested in this feature.

Thanks

[ossilator]

i think this proposal suffers from two major issues:

1. what is the use case? other than "most email clients have this feature", no motivation is provided.
2. the suggested implementation seems perfectly reasonable, but given neomutt's target audience, why would this need to be a built-in? a cron job would seem adequate.

[jindraj]

There's a way to implement send later feature on top of msmtp with msmtpq https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/554369/85046.