Here’s your reminder

Want to be alerted about mail or card you need to send next Thursday? Turn to these services.

Feeling rushed off your feet all the time, what with meeting needs of the present and trying to plan for future commitments? You could be wishing you had an online Jeeves of sorts, somebody who could do the groundwork, organising your schedules for you, and better still, reminding you at the right moment – send so and so this card, prepare for important meeting, and so on.

Just turn to the Internet and you might start breathing easy on this front. The Web has self-organiser tools, or e-mail scheduling services, that will act as your virtual personal assistant. Using these, you can send e-mails and files in the future — once or periodically, using flexible schedules — something our regular e-mail services don’t offer.

With such a reminder utility, we can send e-mail messages/reminders to ourselves or to others about the commitments — such as an important appointment with the boss, a business meet, interviews, your family members’ birthdays, other to-do lists.

Go on, try the following e-mail scheduling services :

www.Lettermelater.com : With this Web service, you can send e-mails to anyone you wish, with the ability to have them sent at any future date and time you decide.

Most Web-based email services don’t offer the convenience to schedule e-mail messages. If you click ‘send’, the mail is delivered instantly and a feature missing from these regular services is the ability to schedule e-mail delivery.

With this Web site, you can write e-mails with your existing e-mail address, and they will get sent at the exact date/time that you specify.

Once you get registered with the Web site, you can schedule and send reminders/e-mails by logging on to the site. The messages can be sent in ‘txt’ or ‘html’ formats.

Apart from the above, you can also send scheduled messages directly from your primary e-mail program (GMail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) by simply e-mailing it to ‘ me@lettermelater.com’. The Web site clearly explains the steps you need to follow to send scheduled messages from your e-mail program that has an account with LetterMeLater.

By using ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ options, you can forward scheduled e-mails to as many people as you wish.

You can also track and manage scheduled e-mails online. Your e-mail will be the return address on the e-mails you send. Your recipient can see your e-mail address and reply.

For those averse to sign-up/registration formalities, the Web site has another user-friendly feature called ‘Quick Send’. Here, there are no sign-up procedures, you can directly go to the ‘Quick Send’ option and send scheduled messages/reminders instantly.

But the e-mails you send with this format will have the return address of webuser (at) lettermelater.com.

According to the Web site, the time zone has been auto detected. If the time given does not match your local time when the page was last loaded, you must make the necessary adjustment. It has a flexible date format. You can also enter specifications such as ‘now’, ‘next week’, or ‘tomorrow at 2 p.m.’

www.timecave.com: Want to make sure you don’t forget something, whether it’s an important date or appointment? Use Time Cave, a free reminder service, to meet your commitments.

The Web site does scheduling of your e-mail delivery, like the other one we saw.

All you have to do is get signed-up with the Web site to access this service. Just drop an e-mail message or reminder into Time Cave and instruct it when to come out. It provides options such as days, weeks, months, or even years to schedule your e-mail delivery.

The neatly-designed Time Cave will hold onto your message. Once the message’s time comes, it will be delivered to your e-mail or whomever you addressed it to. According to the Web site, all messages you send to any e-mail address, other than your own, will appear to come from your e-mail ID, not from Time Cave’s. Only messages you send to yourself appear to come from Time Cave.