Follow up emails work

While I'm sure the various "follow up" services are great (I'm a pretty big Boomerang Gmail fan myself), it's also incredibly easy to roll your own solution to this problem using gmail filters.<p>When sending a message that needs a followup, BCC yourself - something like myname+followup@gmail.com. Then setup a filter that labels/stars/etc all messages to myname+followup, and you'll have a nice queue of messages that need to be checked for responses.<p>Once I started tracking this, I was absolutely blown away by the percent of emails I send that get ignored. I'm not selling anything, but still get &#60;50% response rate.

So far, I don't see anyone suggesting an IMAP-based solution. Good! Because that's what we interviewed at the last YC for. What's cool about that is then you can use any client, browser, email provider, whatever.<p>Time for a plug - <a href="http://stacyplease.com" rel="nofollow">http://stacyplease.com</a> - it's still in active development and we took in PG's feedback from the rejection letter. In fact, it's one of three things we're going to roll out and apply for in the next week.<p>Sign up and stay in touch!

I love the idea (and simplicity of it) but isn't this basically forwarding each scheduled message to follow up service? Seems like a little too much trust involved for me.

A non-technical trick I learned was to try to send emails 10am local time of the recipient, Tuesday thru Thursday. I found this was the time I was most likely to get a response because most people don't like responding on the weekends to non-personal messages. On Monday they are digging out from the pile of messages from the weekend, on Friday they just want to get thru the day.

I love this new class of services that integrates into email workflow unobtrusively. No additional software, can use it from your cell phone, etc. One thing I've done is add the addresses to my address book with a easy-to-remember "names". That way I can just type "next week" into my BCC field and it auto-completes for me.

I've been using followup.cc for this purpose (among others) for the past few months and am a complete fanboy - it's a great tool for inbox-obsessed task managers like me.

We've gotten some great responses from users that use Momentomail for exactly this kind of thing. One user also sends their "thanks for the great meeting" followup messages before their meetings even happen, and another send a series of emails at stages before the completion date of a project, "just a reminder, the paperwork for xyz project needs to be filed in 5 days", "...in 3 days", "...today", but she schedules these all months in advance.<p>Email is such a great scaffolding for all kinds of wonderful services, but because it's old, nobody seems to see it as the modern social app that it really is.

I've been working on a simple service that does a similar thing, but for phone calls.<p><a href="http://www.remindlyo.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.remindlyo.com</a><p>You put who you want to call and when into the system and sometime during the day we call you and connect you to them. They see your caller id and everything. Right now all you can do is take it for a spin with the free trial, but soon I'll have the full product up and running.

The Gmail Snooze Google Apps Script is another <i>semi-solution</i>; rather than BCC, it will make a message reappear in your inbox in X days. The difference is that you add a label to any sent mail that you want to follow-up on.<p>Here's the tutorial: <a href="http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze-with-apps-script.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze...</a>

Definitely, an interesting idea. I do a ton of follow-up emailing and it's crucial because because the first email often falls through the cracks. Plus, dealing with several different follow-up tabs on my gmail isn't nearly as efficient and Followupthen. My only concern is that it wouldn't be as easy for me to get an overview of my current email situation if I didn't have everything tabbed.

I'd much rather use a browser plugin, a la Rapportive. Anyone know of such a service?

What solutions exist for mail.app?

How does it stop following up? After being triggered once?