Firefox/Chrome Plugin That Allows You To Schedule Sending Emails on Gmail ~ Bauer-Power Media

Jun 12, 2013

Firefox/Chrome Plugin That Allows You To Schedule Sending Emails on Gmail

10:00 AM

Paul B

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBase

I have always enjoyed the ability to schedule sending an email from Outlook at a specific time. Sometimes knowing an email has to go out precisely at say, 7PM Eastern Time on June 12th for instance, you could type up your email now and schedule it to send precisely at that time.

Well, I needed to do that today in order to participate in Operation Troll The NSA, which is asking everyone in the world to email a particular script at the the same time. The script contains a number of key words that the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security uses to look for particular terrorist threats in our supposedly private emails and phone calls. The idea is that if millions of people sent an email with the same buzzwords at the same time it may succeed in jamming up the NSA's PRISM system.

Will it work? Who knows? That's besides the point. The point is that I wanted to schedule this email to send at precisely 4:00PM Pacific today, but I wanted to schedule it from Gmail. That feature is not natively built in, but I found a Firefox/Google plugin that will let you do it. It's called Boomerang!

From their page:

Send an email later
With Boomerang, you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Just write the message as you normally would, then click the Send Later button. Use our handy calendar picker or our text box that understands language like "next Monday" to tell Boomerang when to send your message. We'll take it from there.

The best follow up reminders
Want a cleaner inbox, but don't want to lose track of important messages? Use Boomerang to take messages out of your inbox until you actually need them. Just click the Boomerang button when you have an email open, and choose when you need it again. Boomerang will archive the message. At the time you chose, we'll bring it back to your inbox, marked unread, starred, or even at the top of your message list.

Remind you if you don't hear back
There are times you need to make sure you follow up within a specific time frame after sending a message. You can select to only be reminded if nobody replies, or regardless. This way you won't let messages slip through the crack and will never forget to follow up with people.

Pretty cool right? How do you schedule emails to send at a particular time? Do you use Outlook, Boomerang or something else? Let us know in the comments.