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My employer is looking to reduce email outside of workings hours from internal employees to help reduce workload and stress. I have advised this is a technical disaster and sledgehammer for a wallnut, however management insists.

We would like to either stop it from sending entirely sender side (i.e. an email sent at 7pm is delayed to be sent to the receipient until 9am the next day).

Or for the server to queue on behelf of the user, so it doesnt deliver outside of working hours.

Ideally we would want exceptions to the above, incase from a specific manager (as an emergency) or from external emails.

I have seen an addin from https://www.ivasoft.com/ but these are client side and seem to be for Windows - this is a mix of Windows and Mac users on Outlook, and would be a very manual process to install agents so ideally server side policies.

We would be ok to have them use the web browser outlook.office.com exclusively and retire the desktop based Outlook.

If not with Office 365, what other mailservers (i.e. google etc) would offer the above mailflow features.

morleyc
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  • Agree with what joeqwerty has replied above, your request seem cannot be achieve in exchange side. – Joy Zhang Jun 17 '22 at 02:50
  • I would stay away you and your management will get a lot of unhappy users, in this day and age every employee should be able to decide this for themselves. Also think about if you are a good employer if you do this to your employees, I don't think so. Give them the flexibility when and where they want to work. At the moment there is nothing built-in. – Ace Jul 15 '22 at 07:15
  • If the downvote can please be removed, this is on behalf of one of our MSP clients who insists... If we don't we will loose the contract. They won't listen to best practice or use less aggresive tools such as Microsoft Viva for digital well being unfortunately – morleyc Jul 16 '22 at 10:17

1 Answers1

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"Don't send email unless it's an emergency". "Don't read or respond to email unless it's an emergency".

Neither of these can be solved with technology. This is a people and culture problem. You need to inform your people and discourage them from sending, reading, and responding to email outside of working hours. You need to find an alternative communication method to communicate outside of working hours during an emergency.

At the end of the day, people are what they are. You're not going to get 100% compliance with any sort of "don't work outside of work" policy.

joeqwerty
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