Follow up emails work | Hacker News Reader

Follow up emails work

gettingmoreawesome.com

79 pointsrishi27 comments

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.

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.

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 <50% response rate.

GMail also has a "fancy stars" lab plugin that makes flagging mails that need follow-up very easy. The advantage to your approach, admittedly, is that it works in any email client, not just GMail's web app.

This is a great system. Depending on the type of emails you're sending, you could also use Gmail Labs' Canned Response feature to speed up the follow-ups.

You're right, but it doesn't solve the problem discussed in the article. He's not looking for a laundry list of emails he needs to follow-up on in the future. He (like many of us who do Inbox Zero or are otherwise GTD-ish) will only want the three emails he has to act on, exactly two weeks from now, to show up in his inbox on that day.

Simpler solution (which GTD practitioners already know): keep a Waiting On list. Put due dates on it. Follow up when you hit the due date.

I use Todoist, but this will work with many todo systems, including pen & paper ones. When populating a project with items, like "Email Greg with questions from the RFP", I also add an item, like "Get RFP questions from Greg" and tag it with @waiting. I will also give the latter item a due date (e.g. 24 hours). If I want to see everything I'm waiting on, I can just look at the @waiting tag, but it's going to pop up when it's due anyways.

This is a much better solution if you already have todo lists, since you don't have to train yourself to perform a different activity, or keep track of yet another list of things in another program. Plus, it separates todo list maintenance activities from your email inbox. That kind of mental separation makes me way more productive by reducing the complexity of the given activity (i.e. sending an email).

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.

Time for a plug - http://stacyplease.com - 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.

I signed up:

> Sorry to be so mysterious about what Stacy is, it's not on purpose! The site's barely a few days old because we just landed an interview with the Ycombinator startup incubator for their summer 2011 session.

This doesn't inspire confidence that you are going to launch any time soon

Thanks for catching that text!

Funny story - we've been focused on other related projects this summer because we launched part of the underlying tech as an API (called EmailYak) just to get it out of the way so we could start prepping for the YC interview. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, it was getting paid customers and we probably interviewed for the wrong thing! It's even had an acquisition offer. Craziness.

Now we're circling back around to building several apps on top of the API (including Stacy) to show what it can really do. Here's a few sneak previews:

* GitDash - instant mailing lists for GitHub collaborators - http://alabut.com/projects/gitdash/

* Messagify - it's like a private Disqus. Or something. More like Facebook Messages or Twitter DMs, actually. http://messagify.com

The new EmailYak site will also have a bunch more documentation and blog posts describing all kinds of use cases for receiving email:

http://alabut.com/projects/emailyak/home.png

Sorry for all the plugging, we're just pumped about turning in our YC applications in a few days.

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.

I totally agree with you. As a small business I would not want to share those types of messages with a third party especially when they have no monetization strategy defined on their web site. I don't want my customers ending up with better "offers" from my competitors in the next 6 months. Maybe I am too cautious and paranoid, but to me using a local system seems the only sane way to address the follow up reminder need.

All the services mentioned charge per month, but FollowUp.cc also has a Free plan, not sure about the others.

If security is a big concern and you like the MSDOS-in-the-cc-field interface for this sort of thing (I like a menu, datepicker, and natural language input, but I'm obviously biased!), check out http://www.bumper.cc. It's an open-source replacement for FollowUpThen, FollowUpCC, NudgeMail, Laytr, HitMeLater, etc.

The developer claims that it takes only 5 minutes to set up, and you can get a micro AWS instance for free. Then you control all the data, and you don't have to pay.

Brilliant, was just about to start making one of these myself (this practice would be great for actually getting responses out of lecturers), thanks for sharing.

The developer would be me, thanks for the shout Alex! :)

Quick shameless plug, this was a weekend project and it's up on Github, just PHP and MySQL, so if anyone wants to contribute it is more than welcome.

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.

One of the founders of FollowUp.cc left a comment on the blog post explaining the service a little better to me.

Here are the major benefits of FollowUp.cc in my eyes: 1. Multiple Email accounts all in one account 2. Calendar View of reminders 3. Response Detection (cancels a follow up if a response has been sent)

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.

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.

http://www.remindlyo.com

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 semi-solution; 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.

Here's the tutorial: http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze...

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?

Boomerang Gmail for Google Chrome/Gmail is great (but a bit pricey).

Pricey? It's $5 for gmail.com, $15 for Google Apps. If it generates one extra sale, it's paid for itself.

I do understand that if you're using this for personal communications, that might feel pricey.

What solutions exist for mail.app?

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

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