This has been a long time coming.
Email is a mess. As a guy who whose office is his inbox, I’m ashamed to say that I still haven’t figured out how to manage the office. I’m left with endless clutter, important emails unresponded-to, and no way to get a jump on emails that need to go out.
Very soon, gmail users can get a little closer to inbox nirvana. Boomerang for gmail lets you control when you send and receive emails. You can schedule emails to go out at a set time in the future (perfect for managers who want to frontload reminders), and tell gmail to get rid of a received email until some time in the future (perfect for those “great, this will be essential two weeks from now, and I will definitely have no idea where this is at the point” moments).
Generally, I like to poke holes in products. It's too easy to sound like an ad or a shill if your review is too one-sided. In this case, though, my enthusiasm is unreserved. I stumbled upon this review from The Next Web (TNW), I’ve had zero contact with Boomerang (that will change shortly), and I haven’t had a chance to test the product yet, but none of that matters. I have been craving this functionality, and have dug through gmail’s settings and add-ons for precisely these two functions to no avail.
TNW says the integration with gmail’s UI is beautiful and smooth. The only drawback is that it’s third-party, so you can’t get it as a Chrome or Firefox Add-in.
Here are a couple use cases:
- set up birthday emails for the whole frickin year and forget about social faux pas.
- Create reminders based on benchmarks for your team with “time to get started,” “This is due next week” and “WE NEED THIS YESTERDAY!!” reminders, months beforehand.
- Bounce all of your family emails to Saturday evening, so they don’t clutter your inbox until you’re in the right mindset to chitchat.
- Bounce the bad news emails to Friday night after you’ve had a drink so you can be properly vitriolic.
Boomerang is created by Baydin, and is currently only available for Microsoft Outlook (for $14.95). you can sign up for the gmail beta here.
Screenshots below are from TNW.
