When is the best time to send an email to a person so that your message is opened and read and doesn’t fall off their radar?

Well, the answer will vary depending upon the habits of the recipient. There’s a set of ‘disciplined’ people who check and respond to emails only at fixed times in a day. The other set of people, which I think will include most of us, is always glued to their inboxes constantly checking emails though they may not be responding that frequently.

Obviously, there cannot be single number that fits all but Xobni*, a free plugin for Outlook that I’ve mentioned before, does seem to offer a logical solution. When you open a message inside Outlook, Xobni will display a bar graph suggesting the various hours of the day when that person has written / replied to you in the past.

These patterns are probably a good indicator to determine when he or she is most likely to check and respond to emails.

You could probably schedule your next important email around those hours and it might help you get an early response. You may use the built-in “Delay Delivery” feature of Microsoft Outlook to specify the exact time when a particular message should be delivered.

[1] Xobni, if you are new, adds some useful features to Outlook. For instance, if you get an email from a unknown person, you may use Xobni to find the social presence of that person on the web without even leaving Outlook. With Xobni, you can access your Dropbox files from within Outlook and easily send them to others instead of using file attachments.

See all the other useful Outlook tools and plug-ins.