An hour is short enough that in most cases, users will not notice the delay.
I'm wondering how I'm going to explain that to a new customer over the phone who says "I'll just email that file right now so we can go over it together".
Agreed. I've been involed in operating a larger (hundreds of thousands of active users) mail system a couple of years ago, and users would complain if their mail took more than seconds. We had to upgrade our system at one point because rapid growth had made mail delivery take a couple of minutes on average, and it caused bad publicity - a lot of users had a clear expectation that e-mail should be delivered in a few seconds and that if it didn't something was wrong.
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.
Delaying email by one hour! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wondering how I'm going to explain that to a new customer over the phone who says "I'll just email that file right now so we can go over it together".
Re:Delaying email by one hour! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think changing that perception of e-mail as near instant will be incredibly hard. And if you succeed it will just move even more traffic over to the IM networks and cause spamming of IM networks to escalate instead.