Send Automatic E-mail Follow-ups to Avoid Lost Work
You know the drill: You send an e-mail to Bob asking him to file a budget proposal by Wednesday, but he doesn't reply. The ball's in his court, right? So you delete the e-mail and forget about it. Thursday rolls around, the budget is late, and now you have to scramble.
Unless you're a superhuman project manager, stuff like that probably falls between the cracks all the time. If only there were some way to automatically follow up without having to track all those e-mails yourself. Well, actually, there is. And I have video to prove it.
FollowUpThen is an e-mail service that can automatically send reminders to your e-mail recipients if they fail to follow up on their own.
To use the service, just add FollowUpThen to the CC line of any e-mail, and address it to whatever time period you want to wait before the followup. You can send the e-mail to 6hours@followupthen.com, for example, 3days@followupthen.com, or even 2months@followupthen.com. The time period is totally up to you.
If the recipient replies, no follow-up is sent. But otherwise, FollowUpThen has your back, replying to both you and the recipient. Check out this video for a demonstration of how it works:
There are a few problems with FollowUpThen that keep it from reaching perfection.
If the recipient clicks Reply rather than Reply All, FollowUpThen has no idea the thread has been closed, and will pester both of you with a follow-up. More importantly, if you work in a corporate environment, it might not be appropriate to CC an external Web service, which would route all e-mail outside the firewall and put sensitive information at risk. If those issues aren't a concern for you, though, FollowUpThen is a great, automated way to stay on top of your various e-mail threads. [Via Lifehacker]
