Send Gmail Reminders to Yourself and Others with Boomerang

If you’re anything like I am, then you often find yourself checking email late at night, but you’re hesitant to actually send emails at that hour lest you give clients the impression that you have no life and they can always expect an immediate response from you. Or maybe you have a set of recurring emails that you’re often forgetting to send.

Enter Baydin’s Boomergang for Gmail (it’s also available for Outlook).

Developed by Baydin Software and currently in Beta, this handy little plugin works in Firefox and Chrome, allowing you to control when you send and receive Gmail messages. I scored an invite code, and so far I’m pretty impressed overall.

There are already a few similar products available for Outlook, but Boomerang integrates almost seamlessly with Gmail (I say almost, because sometimes the extension inexplicably wouldn’t show up in my Gmail account). No need to log into a separate website, like some of the other services I’ve tried, and you can yank an email before it goes out if you change your mind. You can also edit emails before they go out, but that gets a little messy, because then Boomerang can’t find the message you’d scheduled, and you’ll need to schedule it again.

Here’s how to schedule an email for sending later:

1. Type up your email in Gmail and press “save.”
2. Click Boomerang’s “Send Later” button.
3. Pick the date and time when you want your message to go out.
4. Presto! Boomerang automatically sends your email through Gmail when you want it sent. You don’t even need to be at your computer.

And here’s how to receive an email at a later day and time (for instance, if you don’t want to be distracted by a certain email thread, you can essentially press the “snooze” button):

1. Open that email message and click Boomerang’s “Recieve Later” button.
2. Choose the day and time when you want it to pop up your in-box again.
3. Boomerang archives that message and gives it the “Boomerang” label in case you need to find it before then.
4. At the appointed hour, your message gets moved back to your inbox, marked as unread and starred so you can’t miss it.

Since Boomerang is still invite-only, we only hope that Google will take the hint and add these features to Gmail themselves. Baydin is also working on other features for Boomerang, including support for Gmail in languages other than English and for multiple sign-in Google accounts.

What do you think? Have you tried Boomerang or similar services? Did you find it useful?

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