# Schedule an email to send later

Some emails shouldn't go out the moment your code runs — a digest belongs at nine in the morning. In Bird, sending later is one field on an ordinary send: scheduled_at. We schedule a send, read it back, find it in the log with a live countdown and a cancel button, and watch it deliver right on time.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjrAVRUN4hE (2:28)

## What we cover

- Picking a send time in the dashboard or the API
- Scheduling in the recipient's own timezone
- Cancelling or editing a scheduled send

## Transcript

_Auto-generated from the video._

Hey there. Welcome to another video. Today we're going to be looking at scheduling an email. Um, there might be specific events where sending an email is required, but not exactly at the moment that an event happens. Let's say the moment a customer signs up to your account, you want to send a welcome email, but you don't want to send it right away cuz you want them to continue the action on your website. So you want to trigger it, let's say 10, 20, 30 minutes into the future. Now, this is where scheduling sends uh come into play. We basically take all of the heavy lifting off uh using the calculations. You send your email as you normally would. The only difference is that you're going to be sending a additional scheduled at parameter with your um with your send, enabling us to actually take care of that schedule.

So here we've got the documentation. We can just have a quick look. As you can see that the only big difference here is that we have a scheduled at included, which we then use to actually take uh the processing on our end. Um, I have a quick send setup.

So we're actually just triggering an email as we normally would. I have the body stored on a local file, and we can see that the email is just accepted as normal. And besides this, everything looks the way that it has been looking. Now, the biggest difference is if we go into the dashboard and we go to our email logs, is that we can actually see that the email is now in a scheduled state. So it's treated as an actual email, it just isn't actually sent yet.

But the moment that your email is um supposed to go out, we will just proceed to actually going into that next stage. So your email will stay on the status of accepted, and the process will happen the moment that we actually send it.

Now, what happens if you actually want to cancel a specific send? Well, there's two ways, you might have already seen it. Within the dashboard itself, you have the option to cancel a send, but we can also do this via the API. Now, we can also cancel it via API.

So I've got Boom, right there. Simple CLI email cancel with the email ID from our previous send. And we say we want to cancel it. Yes, and the ID is then Okay. Happy path. Um cancelled from there onwards. It's a simple one. It's a short one.

Cancelling your emails available now. Happy sending.

## More Email guides

- [Getting started with email](/en-it/learn/email/email-setup) — 3:30
- [How to build an email template](/en-it/learn/email/email-template) — 7:35
- [Send 100 emails in one API call](/en-it/learn/email/email-batches) — 2:36
- [Testing email without spamming anyone](/en-it/learn/email/email-sandbox) — 4:40
- [What happens between send and the inbox](/en-it/learn/email/email-to-inbox) — 2:11
- [What happens when someone opts out](/en-it/learn/email/email-suppressions) — 3:55
- [Why your sending domain is throttled](/en-it/learn/email/email-domain-throttled) — 3:24
- [Buying a dedicated IP](/en-it/learn/email/email-dedicated-ip) — 3:30
- [Email broadcasts: one email to your whole audience](/en-it/learn/email/email-broadcasts) — 8:08

## Resources

- [Documentation](/en-it/docs)
- [Learn more about Email](/en-it/products/email)