How to Send Scheduled Emails From Gmail

Over the years I have used several email services, first I was on Yahoo, then tried Hotmail, then came Gmail and finally Google Apps. I have stopped using other email services because Gmail is so simple and contains advanced features while other email services are still lagging behind.

When it comes to sending scheduled emails, none of the above email services allow you to send scheduled emails on a future date, which is frustrating because there are times when you would want to schedule a message to be sent later. May be one hour from now or may be after a week.

Here are some common examples:

- You are working on a project and want to send an alert to your client at 12.00 noon tomorrow. But you won’t have access to internet at that time and thus want to schedule the message beforehand.

- You use email to upload photos to your Flickr and Picasa web albums. You want to schedule the upload process by sending a scheduled email to your Flickr or Picasa account.

- You want to follow up with someone and want to send a reminder email exactly after 1 week or 1 month.

- You use Gmail as a To Do list manager and would want to automatically add tasks for a later date.

Enter Boomerang4Gmail, the service allows you to schedule emails from your Gmail account (Google Apps accounts are not supported yet). To use it, simply head over to the site and request a free invitation.

Once you get the invitation code, you will be shown a link to download the Firefox add-on or the Google Chrome extension.

Once the extension is installed, scheduling an email message is easily achieved. Log in to your Gmail inbox and you will see a “Send Later” drop down added just above the compose message section. Click the dropdown and you can choose a specific time and day for the message to be delivered.

The available options include sending the message in 1 hour, 2 hours, 4hours, tomorrow, in two days, in one week or in one month. You can also choose a particular time and date for the message, as shown in the following image:

Send Schedules Emails From Gmail

Once the message is scheduled, Boomerang will store the email header in their server and schedule it for the time specified. There is more, you can hide specific emails from your email inbox and make them reappear at a certain time of the day.

For example: If you receive a lot of subscription newsletters through out the entire day, you can use Boomerang to hide specific emails from your inbox and allow them to reappear at the end of the week. This is very useful because you can read the newsletters in bulk and don’t have to spend your precious time deleting unimportant email, looking at subject lines and deciding the priority of a message.

Watch the Screencast

Here is a wonderful screencast which shows how Boomerang works:

Overall, Bo0merang for Gmail is the best solution for scheduling emails from Gmail and anyone who sends and receives a large volume of email everyday, this extension is his friend for life. Thanks to Keith for the hat tip.

Tip: How to find older emails in Gmail