SaneBox: What is @SaneReminders (Formerly @SaneRemindMe) and How Does It Work?

by | Nov 4, 2013 | Google, Google Workspace | 0 comments

SaneReminders notifies you when an email you sent wasn’t responded to by a certain time. It’s also an easy way to send your future self a reminder.

There are 2 different use cases for it:

  1. You send an email and need to make sure you get a reply to (this is how most people use it).  Say you want to follow up on a lead in a week, but only if you don’t hear back.
  2. You want to defer processing an email, and want it put back into your Inbox by a certain time. This is great if you don’t want to forget about an emailed coupon before it expires, or if you don’t want to forget about happy hour on Friday, but people in your group may respond to the email in the meantime.

After you create your first reminder, we will create a new folder called @SaneReminders.  This will hold a copy of the emails that you have requested a reminder for.  It is used to resend your email back to you and to allow users to see what reminders they have waiting for them.

  • Please don’t delete emails in the folder that you have an active SaneReminders for.  If you do, we will only be able to send you a generic reminder instead of resending the actual email back to your Inbox.  Like all Sane folders, you are welcome to rename @SaneReminders to be anything you want.

How to set reminders:

If you want to confirm a reply, put a reminder email address (which are discussed below) in the To: or CC: or BCC: field. SaneBox will track this email and put it back into the top of your Inbox at the time indicated, unless the email has been replied to.

If you are looking for the email to come back into your Inbox, you put the reminder email address in the To: field or simply Forward it to the reminder email address.

For example:

Send an email just To: [email protected], and your email will be sent back to you in 24 hours.

Or, send an email To: [email protected] and BCC: [email protected], and if the milk man doesn’t reply by Monday at 10am, we will put that email back into your Inbox, so you can resend it and make sure you get your milk. To resend the email, simply click “reply” and remove the SaneReminders stuff at the top of the email.  If you want us to remind you a 2nd time, you will need to add the BCC with a SaneReminder Address.

Sane Reminder Addresses

  1. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months from now:<quantity><time frame>@sanebox.comm = minutes
    h = hours
    d = days
    w = weeks
    mo = months
    y = years
    You can also write them out — [email protected] or [email protected]You can combine them — [email protected] means 1 month and 3 days from now.

    You can also attach a time to days, weeks and months — [email protected].

    Lastly, you can simply use [email protected] (which is 24 hours from when you send the email), [email protected] (which is Monday morning at 2am), or [email protected] (which is the same date in the next month).

  2. Day of the week:<weekday>@sanebox.comYou can use the full word or a weekday abbreviations — [email protected] or [email protected].  Your reminder will arrive at the current time on that day. You can also set the hour if you prefer a different time — [email protected]
  3. Date:<day><month name>@sanebox.com or <month name><day>@sanebox.comYou may use the month abbreviations — [email protected] or [email protected].You can set the time as well — [email protected] (so you don’t miss that champagne toast)!
  4. Time of day:<hour><am or pm>@sanebox.com or <hour>.<minute><am or pm>@sanebox.comReceive a reminder at particular time in the next 24 hours — if you send to [email protected] at 10pm then you’ll be reminded tomorrow at 5pm; if you send to [email protected] then you’ll get one in 30 minutes. SaneBox does support a 24 hour clock. [email protected] is the same to us as [email protected]
  5. Keep:<normal-reminder-address>[email protected] Want to send a reminder that can’t be cancelled by a reply — if you send to tomorrow[email protected] then you will be reminded tomorrow even if the person you send the email to replies.  If you are only sending the email to us then you don’t need to add the word keep since there is no risk of our SaneReminder engine replying to you.
    • If you want to alert yourself of an email you send yourself (i.e. if you’re writing yourself a task with a complete-by date), you’ll want to use “keep” in your reminder address so it doesn’t look like you’re already replying when you email yourself.

Sane Repeating Reminders

Add each or every to your reminder address and we’ll keep sending you reminders until you receive a reply or cancel the reminder.
  1. [email protected] — receive a reminder at this time every day
  2. [email protected] — receive a reminder every monday morning
  3. [email protected] — receive a reminder every Thursday at this time
  4. [email protected] — receive a reminder every year on April 5th
  5. [email protected] – receive a reminder on the 10th of every month for paying bills and such
  6. [email protected] – receive a reminder on the first wednesday of every month

Hints and Tips

  • You can use the symbols + _ – . as separators between pretty much anything:  [email protected]
  • Your email is never stored on our server, but this feature requires that when the alarm goes off, we download it to our server long enough to resend it to you.
  • The time of day defaults to the current wall-clock time unless you specify otherwise.  If you say Monday, you’ll get a followup at this time on the next Monday. There is one exception — [email protected] sends you a message on Monday at 2am.
  • All times are in your default timezone. Make sure this is set correctly in your Settings in the section labeled Your Account.
  • We try to send the reminder as close to the correct time as possible, but we may be off by a few minutes.
  • If you want to have the reminders added to your Calendar automatically read this
  • We also understand first, second, third, fourth, fifth

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