How does it stop following up? After being triggered once?
Follow up emails work
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: Follow up emails work
#22A 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.
Re: Follow up emails work
#23So 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.
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Re: Follow up emails work
#24So 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…
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
Re: Follow up emails work
#25So 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…
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.
Re: Follow up emails work
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
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 fre…
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.
Re: Follow up emails work
#27We'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.
Re: Follow up emails work
#28While 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 ne…
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).