I use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 as my email client program. As part of my project management duties, I send a lot of emails. For the most part I really like Outlook, but I have had one issue: occasionally I have sent emails accidentally while I was still in the process of composing them.

The keyboard shortcut for sending an email is Alt-S:

Part of the problem is that the keyboard shortcut for snoozing a reminder is also Alt-S:

Other ways of accidentally sending emails are:

• Saving an email is Ctrl-S--accidentally pressing Alt rather than Ctrl will send it
• Ctrl-Enter can send the email (if it's configured that way)
• Clicking Send on the wrong email window
• Other random mistakes

Several years ago I was rushing to finish an email to a client in the minutes before a conference call with them, and the reminder for the meeting popped up. I instinctively pressed Alt-S to snooze it, but as it was popping up, I had been Alt-tabbing between applications, and my email message window ended up with the focus. The email window immediately vanished--it took me a second to realize I'd just sent my incomplete email. Fortunately, I reviewed the email and it actually made sense and was reasonably complete.

After this, I thought a bit about how to avoid this in the future. A solution I came up with is to enter something into the To or CC line of the email that Outlook can determine isn't a valid email address. Since Outlook can figure out it isn't a valid email address, it will refuse to send. At my company, I use "xxx" as the invalid address:

If I accidentally press Alt-S (or click Send for that matter) the email is not sent, and I get the Check Names dialog instead:

This is my emailing safety net--I can have a number of emails I'm in the process of composing, and I'm not at risk of accidentally sending any of them. This has saved me from "premature emailing" several times.

Note that this only works if the invalid address is not a valid email, and not something that Outlook is able to auto-complete into a valid email! For example, if I just used a single "x", we have an email list at my company that starts with an x, and Outlook will automatically complete it and send it. To test an invalid address, open a blank email, type in the invalid address, and click Check Names. If it resolves, it's not usable for blocking. If you get the Check Names dialog above, it works.

Once you are ready to send the email, just delete the invalid address and press Alt-S.

The only trick to this is to get into the habit of adding the "xxx" to the email when you start composing it.