Sometimes, we’d really like to be able to write an email message at one time and send it at another. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be so. As Jason wrote recently in his post about worst email practices, responding too soon might seem rude. At other times, as Nels’ colleague indicated, sometimes too quick a response (or a response at an odd hour of the day or night!) suggests a greater availability than we’d like to communicate.
Yet, barring a way to deal with the email right away and send it later, it’s all too easy to forget about the email, losing it somewhere deep in the inbox. There’s always the possibility of responding immediately and saving the message as a draft, but one still has to remember to send it later.
Happily, there is a way to write an email and have it sent later---automatically. Enter Boomerang (and many thanks to the reader who mentioned it in a comment on Nels’ post!). It’s only available for users of GMail and Outlook, unfortunately, but users of either are likely to find it useful.
There are two principal things that Boomerang does: it lets you schedule a time for a particular email to return to your inbox, and it lets you schedule a time for a message to be sent out.
Scheduling an Email for Return
We’ve all had it happen. We receive an email that we know needs our attention, but it doesn’t need attention now. It’s not an action item, so adding it to a task list doesn’t make much sense. Many of us probably just star or otherwise flag the message, but then we have to remember to go back to our starred messages later. Who really needs one more thing to remember?
Installing Boomerang adds a Boomerang outbox to your labels, as well as a button that appears when a message is open. [Click on any of the images below for larger versions.]
Clicking on that button opens up a menu, allowing the user to set a time for the message to come back to the inbox so it can be dealt with at a later time:
Scheduling an Email to be Sent Later
Should you find yourself wanting to respond to an email while you’re thinking about it, but send it later, Boomerang can handle that, too. Installing it adds a “Send Later” button to the composition window:
And, of course, you can set a particular time and date for the message to be sent. Boomerang will store the message in the “Boomerang Outbox” until the appointed time, then send the message for you.
Handy, indeed.
Boomerang is available as a plugin/extension that works wherever FireFox and Chrome do. The plugin is currently available by invite only (though I found the process of getting an invite to be quite speedy). There’s also a paid add-in version available for Microsoft Outlook (for Windows).
Have you tried Boomerang, either for GMail or for Outlook? If so, what were your impressions? Have you tried other applications or services that do the same thing? Let’s hear from you in the comments.
[Initial image by Flickr user Paleontour / Creative Commons licensed. All other images by the author / Creative Commons licensed.]