I don’t have the answer yet, but I want to build a service that allows somebody to schedule email to be sent at a certain date or time. Most importantly, it should come from their existing email address and integrate with any existing email service.
The point of this post is to gauge any interest, either by comments or (more likely), hits from google. I’ll outline my plan for anyone interested.
An individual signs up to the service through a short two step form. Step 1 asks for their email address and a password to use with the site. On submission an email is sent to the address given to verify that the person has the ‘right’ to email from that account.
Once confirmed there would be two ways to send email at a scheduled time from your own email address.
Method 1
Log in to the site and use a simple email form, similar to any other webmail service. One would be able to specify a list of recipients, the subject, message and any attachments followed by the all important send date.
Method 2
Using your prefered email application, you compose the email and send it to an email address (delay@mail.com for example). In the body of that message are some parameters that tell the service who to send the email to and at what time. I was thinking something like:
(test@mail.com, test2@mail.com : 2pm 1st Decemeber 2007)
followed by the rest of the message. The beauty of this method is you can write the message in thunderbird, outlook, gmail or whatever else you use, and still delay the time the email is sent out to recipients. It’d even work from a blackberry.
Concerns
Put simply, spam and spoofing. There would be the verification step, but I wonder whether this would be possible to bypass? Plus the email would be sent from a server I hosted, not the domains reverse dns IP. Perhaps the mail would be frequently makred as spam?
If this sounds like a service you’d like to use please leave a comment. I don’t want to spend too much time on it if I’m the only person that will use it!
8 Comments
I’m not sure if I’d use it or rather what to use it for. But as Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they needed they would have said “a faster horse”", so maybe you should write what your thoughts are on why you want/need to delay email. Have you had a look at newsletter scripts. I use PHPlist. Lots of options. Maybe you can zap some code from that.
Fair point.. the reason I thought about it was that I needed to send some emails out but it was late on a Saturday evening and I didn’t want it to look like I was catching up over the weekend.
Other reasons could be as reminders, either for others or personal, and for sending out newsletters or other timely emails (although there are other services better suited to this).
And the only other reason I could think of, is to delay the email so that you don’t have to deal with their reply too quickly. That way you can manage workflow a little better. However, again, maybe there are better ways to deal with that.
It looks like there are a few plugins for various clients that already do the same job. However you need your email client open for the email to actually send, which is where this service would trump the competition.
Oh and I find I use this everynow and then. It’s handy when I want to write a nice happy birthday message when I have the time – not on the morning of their birthday! It’s also good if yo uwant to ask someone about a certain event/project etc that you know will happen at a certain time. Maybe yo just won’t have time to write later or maybe you have certain questinos in your mind now yo udon’t want to forget…
My previous post doesn’t seem to have appeared so here goes again. Yes I like the idea a lot however there is an existing service along the lines of method one – it’s a free reliable service that provides a web form which you can use to send email at a delayed date/time from your existing email address(es). It even supports timezones and it seems pretty reliable.
Have a look at the competition: http://www.schedulemail.net
Lettermelater.com is a service that does this but they but their site in the headers so anyone who knows about Headers will see the web site and know it’s being used and possibly spoofed.
there is another one but I couldn’t find it, I’m looking for it now
I am a teacher and have weekly online quizzes and am looking for a service like this so that I can mail my students the answers AFTER the quiz is due. I’d like to send the answers to them as soon as they write but delay in them getting the answers till later.
Is this possible?
Would use it. Also check out http://sendlaterapp.com/ and http://www.hitmelater.com/
I love the idea. I’d like to send a holiday message but will not be at my computer over the weekend, so having a service that will send it out that day would be great.