A Thinking Man

Some time ago I wrote about a couple of applications that were enhancing my Gmail experience, and since then, I have discovered three more that are helping me manage my inbox.  I suppose for many people, email is just email.  However, as a small business user, I get a lot of emails, and many of them represent client enquiries.  Each of these emails therefore, to some extent, is linked to my professional reputation and to my capacity to earn a living.  I need to be able to respond quickly, and to be able to track the correspondence carefully.  The applications discussed below have significantly increased my capacity to do that.

Follow Up Then

FollowUpThen is a very flexible free service that enables you to receive a reminder that you may need to follow up a particular message that you have sent.  You simply add a time reference and @followupthen in the address of the email you wish to be reminded about, and you will then receive a reminder at the time you wish.

It is flexible in two ways.  First, it is flexible about the time and/or date information.  All of the following are acceptable:

1minute@followupthen.com, 3hours@followupthen.com, 2days@followupthen.com, 6weeks@followupthen.com, 5months@followupthen.com, 3years@followupthen.com, wednesday@followupthen.com, wed@followupthen.com, mar30@followupthen.com, 2010-03-30@followupthen.com

Secondly, it is flexible about who receives the reminder.  If you want the recipient to receive a reminder about the email as well as you, put the followupthen address in the CC address line of the original email.  Then, at the designated time, if the email hasn’t been responded to, both of you will receive a copy of the original email with a reminder.  If you only wish to receive a reminder yourself without the original recipient knowing, just put the followupthen address in the BCC address line of the original email.  If you wish to, you can also send yourself reminders about anything by putting the followupthen address in the TO address line of an email.

FollowUpThen state that they don’t share your information with 3rd parties and automatically delete your email contents once the followup has been sent, as well as your recipient’s email address.

I often receive enquiries from potential clients filling in an online form asking for a booking.  My experience is that clients who fill forms in rather than phone are less likely to actually turn up to the appointment.  For this reason I now always ask clients to confirm the booking that I offer them within a particular time period (typically 3 days).  Using FollowUpThen I can now easily remind myself if a client has failed to confirm, and free that appointment slot in the diary for others to take up.

Away Find

AwayFind is a great service that deserves serious consideration.  When I first looked at it I was tempted to dismiss it as just an email filtering service.  However, I’m glad that I took time to explore its potential and understand it, and now have it set up to help me improve my interaction with different types of email senders.  Currently the service is free.  There are plans to introduce a small (price of a bottle of beer) monthly charge at some stage when it moves out of beta - and I for one, will certainly be prepared to pay.

In essence AwayFind does three things:

• It allows you to set up filters (as many as you want) based on email addresses or key words or both so that you can send pre-configured different responses to different groups of people.  Ok most email programs would allow you to do that, but …
• It then contacts you immediately one of the filtered emails reaches your inbox using phone call, SMS, or TwitterDM, and each filter can have a unique method of contact.  You can be away from email, while at the same time be assured that you will hear about anything you don’t want to miss.
• It gives you your own web contact page (mine is HERE) where people can leave urgent messages for you.  These messages are the sent to you using phone call, SMS, or TwitterDM.

There are plenty of examples of professionals using AwayFind to meet their particular needs, and to date, I am using it in three ways.  As a small business owner I am not always in my office, and spend a lot of the day in meetings with clients.  When with clients I have my phone on silent.

• I have set up a filter to respond immediately to potential new clients who fill an online form in, assuring them that I have received their mail and will reply to them as soon as I can.
• I have set up a filter to respond to agencies offering me work, explaining I have received their request and will get back to them at the earliest opportunity.  I immediately receive a text message alerting me to the possibility of new contracts.
• I have a group of colleagues that I offer professional clinical supervision to.  I have set up a filter just for them. If they email me they receive a message explaining I have received their request and will get back to them at the earliest opportunity.  However, I also give them details of my AwayFind urgent message page should then need to contact me in an emergency.  I immediately receive text messages  alerting me to their original email and any other subsequent urgent messages.

It works for me.

Read Notify

There are occasions when it is important for me to know whether something has been received and read - reports and invoices, for example.  ReadNotify is a service that enables you to receive a PGP signed notification of the precise time and date that a particular email is opened.

I recently received an email from an agency asking again for a report on some work that I had done.  Because of ReadNotify I was able to supply them with dates and times of when the email containing the report that I had already submitted had been read.  Another customer failed to pay me arguing that I had never submitted an invoice.  Again using ReadNotify I was able to detail the date the email containing the invoice had been read, and because of this, was able to get my money more quickly.

ReadNotify is so simple to use.  Once you have set up your account, you simply add readnotify.com to the end the address you are sending the targeted email to.  So, if I want to monitor an email sent to accounts@company.com, I simply address the email to accounts@company.com.readnotify.com and press send.  It’s as simple as that. ReadNotify notifies me each time the email is opened.

ReadNotify is a free service, but if you want to use it to monitor lots of emails, there is a subscription of around $24 a year.

Tags: awayfind, Business, email, followupthen, free, ipadio, notify, PGP, pholg, phone, readnotify, reminder, SMS, track, Twitter