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Hallelujah! Delay-send for Gmail

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I have long dreamt of a way to write an email now and schedule it to be sent at a later date. Suppose I'm checking my email and a new message arrives right then. I check it, and hooray, I can respond to it with a single sentence and get it out of my inbox. But wait! I don't want the recipient to start expecting 1-minute turnarounds to their emails. Friends know this happens from time to time, but I don't need the registrar's office to think this is how I roll. However, I can't just let the email sit there, or worse I might forget to mark it as unread, or forget to "star" it.

Well, with Boomerang for Gmail I can write the insta-reply, but turn it into a delayed response:

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Blair said…
Hey everybody,

Unfortunately Gmail doesn't allow you to schedule emails to be delivered at a certain time, so programs like Boomerang are required. Another (free) option you can try out is Gmail Delay Send (http://gmail-delay-send.googlecode.com). It's a free service written in Google Apps Script that runs on Google's own servers. Because it doesn't require anything to be installed on your phone/browser it's available on any platform you can compose a gmail message from.

The way it works is you compose an email directly within gmail, the only change to your normal process is to specify on the subject line when you want the email sent (eg. instead of "I love gmail" you would write "I love gmail -- tomorrow, 1pm"). The email will be sent by from your gmail account at the time specified.

Hope this can help some of you.

Thanks,
-Blair
January 13, 2012 at 12:32 PM
Kelly said…
Be careful about GMail Delay Send. It requires their having full access to your Contacts and enables them to put advertising at the bottom of your e-mails. Not exactly free.
July 22, 2013 at 2:25 PM
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