[DanielBMarkham]

As always, the same two questions.

1) How to build it? (server-based or client-based) and 2) Who's going to pay for it?

It sounds like one of those things that a small number of people talk passionately about but there's not actually any money in making their pain go away. Or maybe -- beats the heck out of me where the payback is.

Client-side this is less than a week on the Microsoft platform -- a month if you want to handle all email clients. Server-side? I think you'd have to pick just one mail host and stick to customizing it.

One of the issues would be turning it off -- you'd have to have some kind of neato keypad test thingy to prevent drunken farts from just clicking the button and sending anyway. That leads me to believe a better design might be client-side.

[13ren]

It could be implemented as a variation on "saved drafts".

Since Gmail has a bunch of google lab apps in the gmail settings, it might well happen....

http://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs

[eru]

How about sending your message to a kind of delaying-mail-proxy server could help?

[eru]

Please pardon my garbled post. It's been too late.

[DanielBMarkham]

That's a nice one. Didn't think about that. It's a nice compromise between client and server solutions.

Store-and-forward has another big set of issues though. File sizes and bandwidth requirements are easily non-trivial. In addition, there could be legal issues with keeping the data around for awhile and then forwarding that wouldn't exist if you just piggy-backed on some other app. In a way, it kind of puts you in the league with GMail and the other guys, right?