When you finish writing an email in Gmail but don’t want to send it immediately, leaving it in the Drafts folder and reminding yourself to click “send” at another time is the usual course of action. Third-party services that work through a Chrome (or Firefox) extension can let you schedule your email to be sent on a later day and time of your choosing.
Most of them can also let you mark an email so that the service can remind you of it on a later day or time — for example, if you’re too busy at the moment to focus on replying to it. Here are reviews of Boomerang, Bananatag and Right Inbox.
1. Boomerang
The top dog in this kind of send-later/remind-later service for Gmail is Boomerang. The Boomerang extension appends a toolbar below the email composition toolbar of Gmail: It has a big red “Send Later” button. Clicking it opens a panel from which you pick a day and time, or among preset schedules, when you want the email to be sent. Your email can be sent on a repeating schedule, but this is a for-pay function. The service refers to being reminded of an email as to “boomerang” it. When you open an email to view it, a button with the “Boomerang” logo appears to the right of the top toolbar. Click it, and a menu pops open from which you can set the day and time, or choose from presets, for when you want to be reminded of this email.
An outgoing email can also be set to send you a reminder if you don’t receive a reply email from the recipient. If you’ve subscribed to a paid plan, you can add a note to it. This extension adds a category named “Boomerang” to the email label column on the Gmail main screen, which groups together all the emails you’ve applied Boomerang’s remind-later function to.
When a reminder deadline passes for an email, it is relabeled and moved into another category folder: “Boomerang-Returned.” Boomerang’s send-later and remind-later features are free, but only for up to 10 emails that you apply either of these functions to per month. This limit could be too low if you like to write lots of emails in advance and send them later, of course.
Boomerang sells three subscription plans, which start at $4.99 per month. Pay for any of these plans, and you can then apply the service’s functions to an unlimited number of emails. So how do two other, similar services — which offer free plans, too — stack up against Boomerang?
2. Bananatag
Bananatag too adds a toolbar with a “Send Later” button below the original email composition toolbar, and clicking it opens a panel where you can pick a day and time, or preset schedules, when you want the email to be sent. Here, you can also set the email to be sent on a recurring basis, and Bananatag let’s you do this for free — unlike Boomerang.
Bananatag refers to its remind-later function as “snoozing.” But it’s similar in function to the way Boomerang does it: When you open an email to view it, a red “Snooze” button appears to the right of the top toolbar. Click it, and the same panel used to set Bananatag’s send-later function appears, so that you can pick the day and time, or choose from presets, for when you want to be reminded of the email.
Emails set to remind-later are labeled “Bananatag Snoozed” and grouped into a category with this name in the email label column on the Gmail main screen. When a reminder deadline passes, the snoozed email reappears at the top of your inbox. Send-later, remind-later, and sending recurring emails are all free, for up to 5 emails per day. Otherwise, three plans start at $6.25 per month, which lets you apply Bananatag’s features to up to 100 emails per day.
3. Right Inbox
Below the email composition toolbar, the Right Inbox extension adds three buttons: “Send Later,” “Remind Me,” and “Recurring.” Clicking the first two brings up the same panel interface, where you enter the day and time, or pick a preset, for when you want your email to be sent, or to be reminded of it. Clicking the “Recurring” button lets you set an interval for how often you want the email to be sent repeatedly, but, like Boomerang, this is a paid feature.
Right Inbox gives you the option to apply a label to an email by clicking the upside-down triangle to the right of each of these buttons. For example, clicking the one by the “Send Later” button will apply the label “Scheduled” to the email. The upside-down triangle button by the “Remind Me” button offers more functions for what Right Inbox should do with the email after the reminder deadline passes — such as placing it at the top of your inbox, starring it, or only reminding you of it if you don’t receive a reply to it.
Just like Boomerang’s and Bananatag’s implementation: To be reminded of any email in your Gmail, you open it and click the “Remind Me” button that’s been added to the right of the top toolbar. The panel that opens for you to pick a day and time, or preset, is the same that appears in the email composition window when you click the “Remind Me” button.
For free, you’re only allowed to apply send-later or reminder functions to up to 10 emails per month. Again, scheduling emails to be automatically sent on a recurring basis is a paid function, which is $7.95 monthly. You’re then allowed to apply Right Inside’s send-later, reminder, and recurring features to an unlimited number of your emails.
Conclusion
If you want to avoid paying anything, clearly the best deal is Bananatag, which lets you apply its features to up to five emails per day. They even allow you to schedule recurring emails for no money. If you want some more choices as to what happens to your emails after they’ve been set to remind you at a later moment of their existence, particularly to keep your Gmail inbox and categories more organized, take a look at Right Inbox for its reminder function. Need to schedule sending out a whole lot of emails, en masse, like for a marketing campaign or other business purposes? Boomerang wins here with its monthly $4.99 plan.
