MailReminder is a free service to get email reminders. Once you have signed up with this service, you just need to send email to special email addresses, and MailReminder will send you reminder email at the specified time. It’s as simple as that.
The way MailReminder asks you to specify time for reminder is pretty interesting. You need to specify date and time information in the email address to which you will send the email. For example, if you want to be reminded in 2 hours, you will send an email to [email protected].
One of the best use of this convention is that you can forward any email to MailReminder and get the same email back at the specified time. For example, if you get an invoice from a vendor that you have to pay after 3 days, you can just forward that email to [email protected] and MailReminder will send you the same email back after 3 days. This will ensure that you know what action has to be taken.
In the screenshot below, you can see reminder email sent by MailReminder.
MailReminder is free for first 100 reminders. At this time, it is free beyond that as well, but once it implements a payment system, it will start charging beyond the 100 free reminders.
Also, do note that this system is not really unique. A few years back we covered a service called Nudgemail that operates in the same manner. And that one does not have limit of 100 free reminders.
Special Email Addresses to Use with MailReminder:
As I mentioned earlier, the beauty of MailReminder are the special email addresses to which you have to send the email to get reminder email at that specific time. Now, the email addresses are so intuitive that you don’t really need to remember them (as you saw in the two examples above). In addition to those email addresses, it has some special email addresses as well, like, tonight, tomorrow, any day of the week (monday, tuesday, etc.), and exact date.
Below is a screenshot of some sample email addresses that it supports:
As you would have probably noticed, there is no option to get email at a specific time (like, 5:25 P.M.). For that, you need to calculate number of hours after which you want to get reminder and then send email to [email protected], where “XX” is the number of hours you calculated. I really wish it supported time as well.
How to Use MailReminder To Get Reminder Emails:
The sections above would have already explained how to really use this service, but for sake of completeness, I am detailing the complete process here:
- Go to Homepage of MailReminder (using link given at the end of this review).
- Sign up using your email address.
After that, you can start using it immediately. Just go to your email and send any email to relevant email address of mailreminder (as detailed above). At the specified date / time, you will get a reminder email, that will have the same subject as the original email that you sent. In this manner, the reminder email will get added to same email chain as the original email, and you will be able to understand the context of the reminder.
See screenshot below. In this, the first email is the one that I received (a test email that I sent to myself). Second is the email that I sent to MailReminder. And third is the reminder I got back from MailReminder.
Dashboard of MailReminder:
When you are logged in to MailReminder, you can see a nice (though, not very useful) dashboard as well. The dashboard will show you all the email reminders that you have received, as well as the upcoming email reminders.
Unfortunately, it does not give any way to modify the time of upcoming email reminders.
It does show a customization setting for “tonight”. In that, you can set the time at which you should get the reminders that you send to [email protected].
However, it does not asks for timezone information, so I am not sure that as per which timezone it will send that reminder.
Privacy of Emails Sent to MailReminder:
The biggest concern anyone would have while using this type of service is that the data of their confidential emails might be stolen. MailReminder seems to address Privacy Issue nicely.
As per MailReminder, when you send them an email, it does not reads the data of your email. It only reads and stores subject of the email and “Message Id” of your message content. The original email that you send to it is then immediately deleted from its servers. Even the Subject etc. are stored in an encrypted form.
Note: There is no way for me to validate this, but I have shared what MailReminder has mentioned about its Privacy Policy.
Also see: 9 Free Online Reminder Services.
Verdict
Even though there are thousands of reminder apps out there, lot of people still prefer to keep their notes on email or send emails to self to be reminded of something. MailReminder nicely caters to that genre of users out there (probably, I also fall in that group). I won’t use this service to set regular reminders, but if I am on the move and I get some email about which I would like to be reminded about later, I would just forward that to MailReminder, so that it can remind me at that time. And I can comfortably forget about that.
Definitely a useful service.