Take Care of Your Email Follow-up Woes with NudgeMail

The problem with getting a huge number of emails every day isn’t the time it takes to reply to them. Well, that’s a part of the problem — but there’s a bigger issue: forgetting to follow-up on important emails.

Yes, it happens all the time.

Remember the last time you lost out on a deal because you were to send an email on Tuesday and you forgot? Or when you forgot to follow-up on that urgent request by one of your friends or family, and then later spent hours on the phone doing damage control?

NudgeMail is an email reminder service that aims to get rid of email follow-up woes. Now, there are certainly things like Gmail labels, filters and other tools to create your own email follow-up system. But not every one can set them up in the perfect way. A simple service like NudgeMail might be a better alternative.

What Exactly is NudgeMail?

The way NudgeMail works is that you forward any email you need to follow-up on later to a nudgemail.com email address. That’s about it. Yes, there’s really nothing else to do. NudgeMail will automatically send that email back to you at the right time.

As you see in the screenshot above, if you send or forward an email to tomorrow@nudgemail.com, the service will remind you about that email the very next day. The service can be used to set up self-reminders by sending a quick email with the task in the body of the email, or you could use it to forward existing emails that you need to follow-up with the sender (now the recipient) later on.

How it Works

Here are the steps that are involved in making sure that you get the maximum benefit out of this email reminder service.

1. Create a new reminder email. You can also choose to forward an email that’s already in your inbox or in your “sent” items.
2. Send that email to nudge@nudgemail.com and type in the day, date or time in the subject line. You can have “tomorrow” or “June 12” or “3 hours” in the subject line and NudgeMail will send it back to you at that time.
3. Instead of sending it to the address mentioned in the above step, you could also choose to send it to “tomorrow@nudgemail.com” or “june12@nudgemail.com.” That way, you don’t need to alter the email subject.
4. That’s about it. There’s no need to sign up separately for the service. Just send an email and you can get started. You can use the email subject and body to type any message that you need to remember.

Does it Work With Every Email Service?

Yes, actually. Since what you are doing is just sending an email and not using an add-on or software, it works wherever email works.

NudgeMail Commands

There are a huge number of email commands that can be used with this service. For example, instead of sending an email to monday@nudgemail.com, you could send it to mon@nudgemail.com. You could also use nextmonday@nudgemail.com. There are a number of such commands for day, date and time.

If you need to set recurring email reminders, there are commands like hourly@nudgemail.com or daily@nudgemail.com.

There are also some really cool advanced commands. For example, if you want an email to be sent back to you in the next hour, just send it to snooze@nudgemail.com. If you want to see a list of all of your active nudgemails, email status@nudgemail.com and you’ll be able to see them.

A complete list of advanced commands is available on the official NudgeMail “How to” page. In addition, you can integrate NudgeMail with Google Calendar. You’ll find the settings for that on the aforementioned page.

Things to Keep in Mind

Here are some things to keep in mind before you decide to give NudgeMail a shot.

• Emails with attachments don’t work with this service. While you can forward an email that has an attachment, when it is sent back to you, it won’t have that attachment.
• The service is currently in beta and free to use. In future, they plan to launch paid plans. I’m assuming that they’ll continue to have a decent free plan for the users who joined during the beta period.
• You can easily turn it off by sending an email to unsubscribe@nudgemail.com.
• NudgeMail currently works only with emails that are in English. Support for other languages will arrive soon.
• Finally, since your emails are being sent to a different server, there are bound to be security and privacy concerns. They’ve got a security and privacy page, where they talk about the measures they take to make sure that no one else is able to access your emails except yourself. That said, it is always up to the user to trust them.

(I would trust them with most of my emails — except for the ones that are too personal or private. So, I just wouldn’t forward them to NudgeMail. Simple as that.)

Conclusion

Overall, it’s a nifty email reminder service and can come in handy for those who are finding it hard to deal with email overload. Give it a whirl and let us know your thoughts in the comments.