It’s no secret that consumers are looking for technology to help better handle e-mail communications. We’ve written about strategies for keeping the volume of your inbox down, and applications for reminding you to follow up on an e-mail conversation.
Alexander Moore’s Cambridge-based startup Baydin was originally focused on helping consumers better bring in relevant files to e-mail conversations, but he switched focus this winter, and is instead developing an application that allows users to compose an e-mail immediately but actually send it minutes, hours, or days later.
He launched his plug-in, called Boomerang, for Gmail late last Wednesday, with 250 invite codes. People found their way around the invite codes, and as of this morning, more than 25,000 people had downloaded the Boomerang for Gmail plug-in.
“The Gmail version just kind of exploded on us,” he says. “I think we touched much more of a nerve than we thought we were going to touch.”
As I mentioned, we’ve covered other technologies that are looking to remind you when to follow up on e-mails, or to help manage the flow of communication in your inbox. But the Boomerang plug-in seems to be one of the more intuitive ones I’ve seen. It doesn’t require you to go to a separate screen or website, or add an additional e-mail address. The Boomerang button just appears with the text “Send Later” alongside the standard buttons in the composing an e-mail screen: send, save as draft, and discard.
You simply type the e-mail as you would, and click the Boomerang button. The dropdown menu allows you to select what future date, time, or increment of time you want the e-mail to send, and off it goes at your selected hour. It appears to the recipient as if you had physically hit the send button yourself at that future date.
Users can also utilize Boomerang on e-mails in their inboxes that they want to be reminded of at a later date. Just hit the Boomerang button on your selected message and choose from the dropdown menu when you want it to reappear at the top of your inbox. It sends the message back to you, with a star and the “Boomerang” label alongside it, and organizes all the messages you have handled this way in a Boomerang folder on Gmail.
“What’s going to happen is that people are going to realize that this enables them to do a different email workflow than what they’re used to,” says Moore, who’s working on his startup out of Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge.
Moore, who formerly developed switches for HDTV inputs at Analog Devices, was accepted into the startup mentoring program TechStars Boston last summer with a different focus. He was originally developing software that
