Boomerang comes as a browser extension that is available for both Firefox and Chrome. Its purpose is to increase our productivity with the use of email through three main functionalities: tracking emails that have not been answered, sending email to a particular time and reminder emails that need attention in the future. Let’s look a little more each of these features.
Get an idea of how helps scheduled mail functionality is simple. If you did not use any extension, Gmail shows the button ‘Send’ to send the mail immediately.
If we installed Boomerang we have available both that send button immediately as one to send the mail later. The extension takes defaults to send in an hour or two in one day, for example, although you can always indicate the exact date and time you want to done mailing. This feature can be useful if we know what the best time is for our recipients receive our mail.
Reminder functionality allows us to do a follow-up to emails that need an answer but have not received it. Sending email will set the maximum period in which we need to receive a response, and if we do not get it, Boomerang will let us know.
As for reminder emails is designed for situations where we received an email but not the time to treat it (it is not ‘actionable’ at that time that would say in systems management tasks such as GTD). In that case we can tell Boomerang to tell us when the time and we will remove it from our inbox so we are not distracted or have to think about that mail to the point that we can do nothing.
As we mentioned above, Boomerang is not free but has three versions: free, personal and professional. The three available options are commented in the free version but with limitation to the management of 10 messages. The paid versions do not have these limitations and also include some functionality such as notes and reminders associated with a mobile version that is only available in the most advanced version that costs $14.99 per month.