I complain about my email inbox problems endlessly, and even performed a major purge a couple of days ago that wiped out over 23,000 unread emails. I don’t know what the solution is, but I think it may ultimately involve an admin of some sort despite my stubborn hope for a software solution to make things right.
While I wait for that startup/admin to fix my life, Philip Kaplan (my partner in my second best April Fool’s joke ever) (here’s the first) has built a cool new service that I will likely use in the meantime called HitMeLater.
HitMeLater is simple. Forward any email to 24@hitmelater.com and it will send it back to you 24 hours later, putting it on the top of your inbox pile. You can change the number of hours to anything you like, up to 1,000 hours ahead (3@hitmelater.com sends it back three hours later). Alternatively, put in a day (Wednesday@hitmelater sends it back the next Wednesday). If you send it something it doesn’t understand, HitMeLater sends back a polite email message saying “We’re not sure what you want.”
If you’re like me you rely on flags to remember which emails to go back to, but they often get buried and are left unattended. From now on I’ll forward stuff I need to deal with but not immediately to Sunday@hitmelater.com, my slowest email day.
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Cool idea.
So glad you are featuring Startups and SAAS topics again.
The ongoing tech business news was getting just too monotonous.
hum… Michael, don’t you know that you can sort by the flag column in Thunderbird??? if you do so, all your flagged messages are together and not ‘burried’ anymore.
another simple - and much faster than forwarding an email and entering the number of days etc… - is to simply create a sub-folder you can name “SUNDAY” or whatever. To drag-and-drop your emails there will take less than half a second, much faster than forwarding them.
Michael, i think you have really a poor knowledge of Thunderbird’s feature or are just too busy to even bother.
Either way, i think this service is totally useless.
Some option with flag, “double flag” and “triple flag” would be better option for now.
Unitil email service providers open up third party api’s for organising and theme changing.
You know what would be even better is the ability to set quick reminders with email. Except the to address would include the Date in some Way like Sending “Mom’s Bday” to ‘Aug10@hitmelater.com’ or “Call about exam results” to ‘Sep24@hitmelater.com’….
That would be much more useful as that would be much faster than having to go to Google Calendar and creating a new event. It would be comparable to texting to google calendar.
sounds like Jott can do what you mentioned, thought its by phone and not by email. A quick call and you’ll get a reminder about mom’s birthday
I read somewhere that Bill Gates actually has a department to filter his emails manually every day. There is no AI born yet to do this by software.
Yeah actually its true…
> … department …
It’s not a department, it’s a division — 500 people.
Ya right. Are you sure it’s not 1000? 1000 sounds better.
This is something new..I guess it could be useful for when you really need that one e-mail sent to you 3 days later because that is when you’ll really need it for a reminder!
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
your last sentence will boost your sunday-email-traffic, i guess
that’s ok, I’ll bounce all of those emails to Monday.
hehe
Michael, thanks so much for making me aware of this great service. I have set my Outlook inbox to auto forward every E-mail to 4@HitMeLater.com.
Another super great thing about HitMeLater is that it’s realized (the programmer says on his blog “Maybe in 10 years I’ll learn Ruby on Rails… (2008’s hot programming language)). I have no idea why we’re developing IronRuby at Microsoft! We’ll end up like Twitter!
why can’t you just flag the email and then check it later?
Gotta read the “whole” post…
“If you’re like me you rely on flags to remember which emails to go back to, but they often get buried and are left unattended. “
I don’t see the utility in simply bumping emails forward in time. You are still burdened with ‘bumping’ them. You might as well either read them or delete them at that time.
Thats nice but what will I do with spam even after 24 hours.
The guy in the picture sort of looks like you, Mike.
Holy sh*t, it IS Mike!
For the procastinator in us all…
If you’ve read enough of a message to do anything with it at all, doesn’t that already put it way above the 25,000 bankrupt messages? Why don’t you just throw it in a folder called Sunday, or Partially Read, instead of bouncing it back through a server?
Also wondering - why “purge” when you’ve got gigs of storage? Throw it all in a folder called Bankrupt so you can still search it when you need to recover an important thread. The other guy is keeping copies for legal purposes, so you might as well not delete anything yourself either.
a good idea for people who are failures
a good idea for those emails you need to followup on but don’t have the time to at the moment
What a dumb idea. Hopefully nobody uses this for personal emails, god only knows who is on the other side reading them!
are you one of those people who don’t use gmail because you’re worried that google employees are reading your email?
regarding hitmelater, i’m guessing it’s “a computer” who’s reading your email. that said, interesting service but not sure how they’ll make money.
Right, it’s only a computer. Server to be precise. We were asked by Mr. Arrington and Mr. Kaplan to provide the data center, because they predict a HUGE hitting of people later.
Every E-mail sent to HitMeLater will also be published (*) on TechCrunchIT, for people who like their mail in the browser. (It should also increase the number of readers on TechCrunchIT - currently: 3000.)
(*) Technically, this is a so-called “T-joint” (Unix command tee), but it’s not a subsidiary of T-Mobile.
My boss, Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, USA, the Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) and Commander, Joint Functional Component Command – Network Warfare (JFCC-NW), Fort George G. Meade, MD just asked me to add our slogan:
“National Security Agency in all your mailboxes and telephones. Now also in the iPhone app store.”
I hope you don’t see this advertisement. Please publish or I’ll be sent to Gitmo.
Had gmail or yahoo or hotmail opened up apis like facebook did, this idea could have been added to own mailboxes. Some features like this, including themes can be opened up in emails. Forwarding is little cumbursome i need not explain, and thankfully gmail will combine return forwarde mail from hitmelater, still this is too far.
Waiting for “gmail labs” to open up to third parties
Ultimately, this ’solution’ solves nothing: emails that are still arriving by the tons are still left unsorted. It’s just a temporary delay, an ‘I’ll deal with it tomorrow’ sort of thing.
Will stick to labeling emails and creating rules instead.
This is retarded…. you guys are starved for content apparently.
why would someone bother to set something like this up? it can’t possibly make any money by conventional means. the only reason i can think of is to harvest email addresses / personal information.
surely any decent email client has a “flag for reading later” type feature built into it already?
I use the ‘defer’ button in ClearContext at work to keep my Outlook inbox empty. This is the tool I’ve been needing for my Gmail. If I put emails into a “future review” folder, I know I’d just never look at it again.
We have a ‘delete’ button in Outlook, too!
E-mail organization is always a big issue. There was a very nice book called Getting things done, realy nice method.
推荐一个每日都更新发布国内外最新的创意产品设计的网站，有多新奇的创意。
网站名称：创意酷-非设计，不生活
网站地址：http://www.idea-cool.cn
Sounds like another April Fool’s joke - (let’s spoof headers and see if we can bounce 50MB PowerPoint attachments to all of our friends…next Wednesday).
So this email ‘echo’ brilliantly multiplies your inbox consumption by some large multiple because you’re too fucking lazy to sort by column or right-click and add as a follow-up task in Outlook? Not everyone has Gmail-like mailbox limits. Those with stingy corporate admins are routinely auto archiving/purging messages and adding dupes to the mix does not help.
i don’t get, you’ll just have twice the e-mail 24 hours later(exactly twice). Might as well not check your e-mail for 24 hours. It will have the same out come.
This is an interesting idea but I am not sure if there will be use for it in real life… Like most people said if I need an email later I will just leave it in my inbox and go back to it whenever I want….
Why I am seeing a Google Ad on meebo instead of meebo rooms…Any idea ?
hm i suppose this could also be used to email yourself reminders. interesting…
hahaa… what a dumb article.
This is one of my idea which was in my mind since 2 years…..
Damn, somebody is implementing it now…
I would be worried about the privacy of my emails using a service like this.
You know what would be even better is the ability to set quick reminders with email. Except the to address would include the Date in some Way like Sending “Mom’s Bday” to ‘Aug10@hitmelater.com’ or “Call about exam results” to ‘Sep24@hitmelater.com’….
That would be much more useful as that would be much faster than having to go to Google Calendar and creating a new event. It would be comparable to texting to google calendar.
If you need to send yourself reminders or schedule Emails, SMS and Social Network messages ahead of time , I use a tool called Sendible.
http://www.sendible.com
They’ve just launched an API, so I’m hoping a mobile and desktop app will be developed soon!
If you need to send yourself reminders or schedule Emails, SMS and Social Network messages ahead of time , I use a tool called Sendible.
http://www.sendible.com
They’ve just launched an API, so I’m hoping a mobile and desktop app will be developed soon!
I have the same problem but this sounds like it just increases the problem. My solution? A secret address box for important people, and then I largely ignore the other one. But I use gmail to highlight certain people, words (media inquiry, consulting!) or groups. I need to get back to Franklin Covey and stop living my day by e-mail.
This has to be the dummest product I have ever read about on this site. Yah, that is exactly what I want, take my over stuffed email box and send me the same email again tomorrow!
even dumber is the guy who bothered to write GOOD things about the product! haha.
A few weeks ago I launched a service called “Resnooze”, for easy set up and management of tasks to snooze on, i.e. recurring email reminders.
It also supports forwarding-in email messages which then become recurring reminders.
http://www.resnooze.com
Ori
This is one of those services that you sign up for because it sounds useful but then it becomes just one more thing you never actually use.
It’s good to know the emails I send to Mike have the potential to read by people at another company.
Why not just set some rules in Outlook?
this maybe one of dumbest startups ever
No wonder I neve get replies to emails I send to TechCrunch.
gootodo.com implemented this several years ago… and the upside of GTD is that you don’t use your inbox as a to-do list.
At first this seems like a good idea, but it just ends up contributing to the problem. If you have too much email, why would you want to use something that sends you more.. especially a duplicate of what you already have?
The solution is to forward your email to a *todo* list that consolidates your action items in a single place, showing you only what you need to do *today*. Check out http://www.gootodo.com, it does just this. You can forward email to aug18 (@gootodo.com), tomorrow, today, wednesday, etc and your email will show up as a todo on your list for that day.
ClearContext calls their Defer feature “a snooze button for your email” and it’s really great. I use that feature every single day, it is one of those things that sounds basic but you can’t live without it once you start using it. I will defintly use this service for my gmail messages.
Old idea. Did the same thing in Jan. 2006. Still own the domains emailsnooze.com and mailsnooze.com (Pud, interested?).
Contrary to the negative comments above, the functionality can be quite useful. Used it on my Blackberry to ’snooze’ important incoming email while on the road (snooze time dependent on length of trip).
Suggestion to Pud:
- add a ‘three strikes’ rule (three snoozes and it’s ignored forever)
- add an auto-responder which sends a little ’snoozifier’ to the ’snoozee’ (person whose email has been snoozed) that email was received but won’t be properly handled before date/time xx:xx and call in case a response is needed sooner.
This is effing LAME! Solves no problems, just postpones them…..
HOW DO THEY MAKE MONEY??? by selling your personal email data? unbelievable check it… http://www.JohnAssaraf.com/hia.....s=hiac2008
Hi Mike,
Hey, you might want to take a look at our product http://www.emailcenterpro.com. With Email Center Pro you’d be able to manage all of your email from one central location, use templates to respond to messages you deal with frequently, and you’d be able to involve your team in the job to reduce the number of messages you have to respond to personally. Take a look.
Cale Bruckner
Palo Alto Software Inc.
Vice President - Product Development
Very interesting concept. It will be nice for those people who need the reminder at the top of their inbox.
http://kreuzer33.wordpress.com.....eir-email/
I don’t get the big deal about this. I don’t care who you are, you should only have a limited number of people that have your *primary* email address. For all the rest, you set up a few lower priority email addresses. Anyone in this day and age that has one email address that they give out to everyone is nuts.
The biggest challenge is how to stop your main email address from being given out by someone who has it, which is why I only give that address out to the VIP that I want to have it, the people who I need to make sure to read their emails.
This solution is a waste of time…why circle a full parking lot that will never be empty…
If you mention a day of the week does it know the timezone. Maybe it assumes we are all in the same timezone. Could work with hours but not for days for me.
Seems like a breech in the space time continuum.
Monday meets Friday?!!
Don’t let those emails every cross each other — ever.
-The Doctor
Seriously? This has all the logic of GTD turned up side down. If you don’t use this service a lot, then you’ll not really change your habits that are causing trouble; and if you use it a lot you increase the nag value of email, and create more distractions.
The “follow up” should be handled by the application that manages your email, not by just pinging you again. Creating auto reminders from emails is a far better option. And if the message is not worth creating a reminder for, then its not worth bothering with again anyway.
LOL, too true. It’s the most ridiculous concept I’ve ever seen, the very antithesis of productivity.