Although the stock Mail applications on iPhone, iPad, and Mac don’t allow you to schedule an email to be sent automatically at a later date, there are applications you can use to do just that. Spark, a free application for iOS and Mac, is one of these applications.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to use Spark on iPhone, iPad, and Mac to schedule emails to send at the day and time of your choosing in the future.
Why would you want to schedule emails?
There are plenty of reasons why you’d want to set an email to be sent at a future date rather than now.
For example, you might want to schedule a “happy birthday” email for one of your friends now so you don’t forget when his actual birthday comes. For professionals, you might want to schedule an email to your boss at 5.30am to make it look like you’re up and working early. Or maybe you work with someone in a different time zone, and want to make sure this person receives your email at a specific time rather than in the middle of the night. Delaying the delivery of the email can in this case ensure the recipient is at his desk when the message is sent.
Either way, if you want an email to be delivered in the future, we got you covered.
How to schedule emails on iPhone
These instructions were written for iPhone, but the process is the same if you use the Spark iPad app.
1) Download and set up Spark on your iPhone or iPad.
2) Create a new email.
3) Fill in the recipient, subject, and body of your email.
4) Tap on the email scheduling icon located to the right, directly above the keyboard.
Draft email to schedule on iPhone
5) Choose from one of the pre-defined schedules, or you can tap on Pick date to select your own date and time. When you have set your date and time, tap on Apply. Note that Spark allows you to schedule up to six months into the future.
Schedule email on iPhone
6) Your email is now ready to be scheduled. As you can see at the bottom right corner of the screen, it is set to be sent on February 27, at 9am. To finalize, tap on the email scheduling icon in the upper right corner.
Email ready to be scheduled
On this date and time, your email will automatically be sent to your recipient. If in the meantime you want to cancel or change the schedule, you will find your scheduled email in the Outbox folder.
How to schedule emails on Mac
1) Download Spark for Mac, and set it up with your own email account.
2) Create a new email. Fill in the recipient’s email address, the subject line, and the body of the email.
3) Click on the Schedule icon, right next to the Send button.
Prepare email to schedule on Mac
4) You may choose from one of the pre-defined dates and times, or select your own, which we are doing for this tutorial. We want to schedule our email to be sent at 9am on February 27th. Click on Set Time when ready.
Select date and time for email schedule on Mac
5) As you can see on this screenshot below, your email is now successfully scheduled. Click on the blue Schedule button to finalize.
Email ready to be scheduled on Mac
Your email will automatically be sent on your set date and time. If you need to make a change to the email itself, the schedule, or simply delete the email entirely, you can find this email in the Outbox folder of Spark on your Mac.