Friday, June 21, 2013

How to Setup Email Reminders Using Email

If you want to check back on something later and you don't have the time to set up complex reminder programs - you can simply setup email reminders in Gmail or other mail programs. All you have to do is send an email to the appropriate FollowUpThen email address.

I do it all the time... especially when I am using a mobile phone. If I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop or if I just want to dump a hack into my email ID to read on it later, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or if I just need to remind myself of somethign, I jot it down in a message and email or SMS it to myself.

There are many apps that you can use to schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar or even scripts inside google docs, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your inbox without any setup, check out FollowUpThen.

This service allows you to quickly setup custom email reminders using email. All you have to do is send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the time interval you specified.



Check out some sample date formats examples that you may want to use while setting up email reminders:

6pm@followupthen.com (to get a reminder at 6 PM exact)
6pmTomorrow@followupthen.com (to get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow)
10minutes@followupthen.com (to get a reminder after 10 minutes)
3days@followupthen.com (to remind me after 3 days)
tuesday@followupthen.com (to remind me the next Tuesday)
nov29@followupthen.com (to setup email reminders for a specific date)

Their service recognizes time zones from your email headers so if you setup a reminder for 1 PM, you will be reminded as per your own time zone. This means you wont have to specify if you are +5 GMT (for PST) as far as your email has the right country set in it. You can also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen although an online calendar like Google's is better for tasks like that.

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