Eric Nagel

I can’t believe I pay more for a service to help me manage my email, than I do for my email account itself. But that’s how useful Boomerang is for Gmail.

Boomerang is an add-on for Gmail, which allows you to recall messages to your Inbox at a later time. There are a few ways you can use this:

When you send someone an email, and expect a reply. After you send the message, tell Boomerang to bring the message back to your Inbox in 2 hours, 4 hours, tomorrow afternoon, 1 week, etc. Or, you can specify a time yourself. So if you wonder how I remember to follow-up on all the emails I send out, the answer is simple: I don’t. I use Boomerang to keep track of it for me.

When you don’t want to deal with an email right away. Remember when I said I pay my bills on Sunday morning? If I get a bill e-mailed to me, I Boomerang it back to my inbox Sunday morning. When I bought 2 Google Chromecasts, I received 2 codes for 3 months of Netflix, but I could only use one at a time. Guess what? The other is set to return to my Inbox when I can use it again.

When the email is Boomeranged back into your Inbox, it’s given the “Boomerang” label and is starred, so you know it’s not a new message, but rather a message that’s been returned to you.

I’ve yet to use all of the features of Boomerang, but you can also schedule a message to be emailed later (spend 1 day & write all your Happy Birthday emails for the month, but schedule them to go out the morning of the person’s birthday), or set up recurring emails.

You can 10 free messages each month, and you can beg for 1 more if you hit that limit. I hit the limit very early this month, so I finally subscribed for $14.99 / month (if you’re using a @gmail.com address, you can get it for just $4.99 / month). Boomerang is part of my Inbox 0 toolbox.