Regular readers know of my mad love for services like Boomerang for Gmail and FollowUpThen, which let you "snooze" emails you receive so they appear at the top of your inbox at a later time.
Boomerang in particular offers nifty integration with Gmail proper, adding a button that allows you to delay messages for hours or days with just a few clicks. Just one problem: It costs $4.99 per month, or $50 annually.
That's why I'm excited to have discovered Snooze Your Email for Gmail, a Chrome extension that provides the same basic functionality as Boomerang--but costs nothing.
Once installed, Snooze Your Email (which also works with Yahoo, its name notwithstanding) adds a Snooze button to your toolbar. While reading any message, just click that button, then choose how long you want to snooze it: five minutes, two hours, tomorrow, next Monday, or any custom time or date.
This extension works a little differently than some of the others I've mentioned. When the time comes for an email to reappear, you have two options: a desktop reminder that pops up in the corner (and optionally beeps), and simply re-marking that message as unread (though this works only in Gmail). But Snooze Your Email does not bring a snoozed message back to the top of your inbox.
From a reminder-effectiveness standpoint, the desktop pop-up is definitely the way to go. And it's particularly cool because with one click, you can snooze the message again or open it.
Based on my quick tests, Snooze Your Email works quite well. However, it's worth noting that the developer isn't actively supporting it any longer, instead focusing on an extension called Checker Plus for Google Calendar that includes many of the same features (and more, as its name suggests). I haven't tried that one yet, but based on what I've seen of Snooze Your Email, it's worth a look.
Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com, or try the treasure trove of helpful folks in the PC World Community Forums. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.
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