A simple script to postpone your own email

http://cfenollosa.com/blog/a-simple-script-to-postpone-your-own-email.html

by im_dario • 11 years ago

57 18 11 years ago

dsjoerg• 11 years ago

very cool! i use followupthen.com for the same purpose.

Came here to post about followupthen[1]. They have a really generous free tier I haven't had to graduate from over six months of using it, and I find forwarding emails to "2016-01-20@fut.io" or "nexttuesday@fut.io" or "mar21@fut.io" to be much easier than moving it to the correct folder.

The system described in this post is too much like a digital Tickler file[2] for me - digital should be easier, not a less-convenient bodged approximation of what we'd do with paper.

1. https://www.followupthen.com

2. The system described by David Allen in "Getting Things Done" for being reminded of deferred actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file

SomewhatLikely2• 11 years ago

I find the ability to create recurring emails even more useful: everyJun16@fut.io or every17days@fut.io

Besides the obvious, I use this for remembering to do things that are nice to do every once in a while, but not required. Like checking local event schedules, lists of new Netflix movies, reminders that subscriptions are coming for renewal, etc.

rsweetland• 11 years ago

Thanks for the mention, guys (Reilly, FollowUpThen Co-Founder here). This little script seems great for tinkering with new email productivity ideas.

j45• 11 years ago

Sweet. I like how this is not tied to one provider. Scheduling emails is helpful when you write in batches, and recipients are better to receive the emails step by step.

benliong78• 11 years ago

Nice, with this you can achieve the "snooze till later" functionality of Mailbox that I still miss to this day.

skierscott• 11 years ago

Spark has the same functionality as Mailbox, including "snooze till later".

dybber2• 11 years ago

The feature from Google Inbox that I miss the most when using ordinary GMail.

I find the Google Inbox browser UI horrible, which is why I still use GMail.

SomewhatLikely2• 11 years ago

I found the fact that it automatically "pins" such emails when they come back to be too annoying. Just because I postponed it doesn't mean it was an important deadline or something. I like to postpone things I hope I'll get around to as well.

dybber2• 11 years ago

Here is what I do: I only use the Google Inbox interface for post-poning stuff. I always read and write emails from the old Gmail interface. So I newer see these pins.

timvdalen• 11 years ago

I think they're (at least at this point) meant to be used together. I've switched from the GMail mobile app to Inbox, but on a desktop, the GMail compose view is just leagues ahead of Inbox.

I like the fact that if you snooze an email in Inbox, it is actually hidden in GMail as well. Honestly, you could get most of the 'Inbox workflow' with just plain GMail and the archive button, but the snooze feature really is very useful.

thecosas• 11 years ago

Simple solution and sounds like it should work with any IMAP provider (provided you tweak the code).

Well done!

SFjulie1• 11 years ago

I remember using "at cat mail and pipes " from my DMZ with a correctly configured postfix satellite. Thus requiring no additional login/pass to be stored.

Ho! It still should works.

Reinvention of the wheel maybe? Or the wisdom of old sysadmins being forgotten in the maelstrom of devops culture?

DyslexicAtheist• 11 years ago

I have a setup with mutt as MUA and offlineimap/msmtpq for smtp/imap handling mainly because I always want an offline access to all my mail hosted on gmail which I can search anytime when without network access.

deferring email is a breeze with e.g. msmtpq set this in .muttrc:

set sendmail="msmtpq --wait 30" set sendmail_wait=-1 #send in the background

same is possible with postfix ...

msielski• 11 years ago

For Gmail you can do similar scripting with Google Apps Script. This isn't exactly the same, but it's a similar example. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze-with-apps...

sam_lowry_• 11 years ago

this is how I usually do it:

~$ echo 'mutt -s "Call a client at 9:00, 9 Apr" lowry@localhost </dev/null' |at 8 Apr </dev/null

dmd• 11 years ago

That's not what this does.

aszantu• 11 years ago

I use lettermelater.com

A simple script to postpone your own email

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