Review: AwayFind lets eagerly anticipated emails find you

AwayFind $5.00 AwayFind lets you cut the ties that bind you to your inbox, without making you miss important emails.

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Most of us check email too much far too often. If you want to cut the ties that bind you to your inbox, but don't want to worry about missing out on important messages, meet AwayFind, a handy service that lets your email find you.

To use AwayFind, you sign up for an account by supplying a few basic details, or—if you use Gmail or Google Apps—connecting to that account. It works for anyone who has an email account and a phone, and it doesn't even have to be a mobile phone. Once your account is up and running, AwayFind delivers alerts, via a phone call, text message, or push notifications, when you receive an important email. That way, you'll know when you need to check your email, rather than monitoring your inbox all day. And AwayFind makes it very easy to specify when you do—and don't—want to be notified.

You tell AwayFind where to reach you, and it tracks you down.

AwayFind doesn't decide which emails are important. Instead, you tell it exactly what you're looking for. You can set up your notification preferences using AwayFind's website, or via the browser extensions and add-ons available for Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. The mobile apps for iOS and Android also allow you to set up and manage your alerts, which is a nice touch if you want to make changes when you're already out and about.

You can set up alerts by people, topic, date, or time. You can, for example, choose to be alerted anytime you receive an email from a specific person, email address, or domain. You can also choose to be alerted whenever a subject line contains a certain word or phrase.  In addition, you can link a calendar to AwayFind and choose to receive alerts when anyone with whom you've scheduled a meeting in the next 15 minutes to 36 hours sends you a message.

Once you've determined when you'd like to be alerted, you can determine how: via an SMS, a voice call, and/or a push notification. You can select any or all of these options, but you can't customize them to different alerts. You can't, for example, ask AwayFind to call you when your boss emails, but text you if your mother sends a message…it's all or nothing. You can, however, choose the times during which you'd like to receive alerts, and you can block them from arriving when you might not want them, such as on weekends or overnight.

You can also choose to be alerted whenever a subject line contains a certain word or phrase. AwayFind includes "asap" and "urgent" by default, but you can remove these and add any that matter to you.

The mobile app adds a useful feature called "Waiting for NOW," which lets you set a timer (anywhere from 1 minute to 24 hours). You enter an email address, name, or domain, and if a matching message arrives during the countdown, you'll receive an alert.

In my tests, AwayFind worked almost perfectly. It delivered the alerts I requested as soon as the messages I'd specified arrived in my inbox. It faltered slightly when I tested the calendar feature, though, failing to pick up a meeting I'd scheduled in my Google Calendar. It turns out this was because of the way I spelled the contact's name in the calendar: It didn't match the email address, so AwayFind thought they were two different people.

AwayFind offers a fully functional free trial that lasts for 31 days. After that, you'll have to pay to keep using it. The $5-per-month Personal plan lets you connect one email account, and receive 100 alerts (SMS or push) per month, which will be delivered within five minutes. The $15-per-month Pro plan supports five email accounts (including Google Apps and Exchange) and 1,000 alerts per month, which are delivered instantly. It also adds support for voice alerts. The $50-per-month Max plan offers unlimited alerts and an unlimited number of email accounts. AwayFind also offers plans for businesses who use Google Apps or Exchange.

AwayFind offers plenty of easy-to-use and useful ways to make sure you don't miss important emails, but its chief limitation is that it can monitor only the messages you're expecting. Should important news arrive from an unexpected source, you could still miss out …and it's exactly that uncertainty that prevents me from relying on AwayFind wholeheartedly.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can subscribe to this service.

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Review: Track and follow up emails with Right Inbox for Gmail

I have been using Gmail as my sole email client for years now, and I'm a big fan. But there's one key thing I need my email client to do that Gmail doesn't offer: Follow-ups. When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn't replied within a few days, so I can resend my message or find out what happened. To me, this is absolutely crucial, which is why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

Right Inbox is just one option in a highly competitive market of email reminder and follow-up services: There's Boomerang, which is pretty costly if you're using Google Apps ($15 per month). There's Followup.cc which is great, and client-agnostic, but that also means it doesn't integrate into Gmail. The list goes on, but my current favorite is Right Inbox, thanks to its seamless integration with Gmail and affordable price. This $5-month service adds a couple of new buttons that blend in well with Gmail's native ones, and presto: You can now follow-up and track emails.

Right Inbox makes it easy to specify when you want to be reminded of an email, and whether or not it should be tracked.

When composing a new email, you need only click the new Remind Me button, and specify when you want Right Inbox to remind you of this thread so you can check up on it. Right Inbox for Gmail offers several preconfigured times, ranging from hours to tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. You can't configure your own favorite intervals (one of the service's few annoyances), but you can pick other intervals using a calendar pop-up.

When a recipient opens a tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail will send you a detailed report including their location and IP address.

Right Inbox for Gmail also offers delayed email sending: For example, you could author an email during the weekend, and have it automatically sent out first thing Monday morning. Finally, you can also enable email tracking, a feature that lets you know when you recipient opened the email. Tracking uses a small, invisible image embedded into the email, so it only works if the recipient opts to display images included with the email (many email clients don't display images by default).

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome Web store, where you can install the latest version directly into your Chrome browser.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Find Out What Happens to Your Outlook Emails With Track Your Sent

The folks at Caelo Software, makers of some excellent tools for organizing your Outlook email, are at it again with Track Your Sent. Unlike the company's NEO Pro, Track Your Sent is not an overall email organizer. Instead, it takes aim at a narrow part of your email experience: the messages you send. Although plenty of email utilities help bring order to your inbox, your sent items folder is often overlooked, left to drown under the weight of its own unorganized mess. Not anymore.

Track Your Sent adds a button that appears on all new messages you create, allowing you to set its category and folder before sending it. Still, it took me some time to warm up to Track Your Sent, a process that wasn't helped by the utility's unwieldy name. Based on its moniker, I expected this to be a utility that would allow you to find out when your sent messages were read. Instead, it's something more far-reaching and useful: an automated way to file and take action on messages that you send in Outlook.

Once you've installed utility, you can set its default actions for all messages that you send. The first two options are "File to Folder" and "Add Category"; here you can set a default folder and category for all messages sent, or you can set it to "Ask," which means you'll get prompted to make a choice every time you send a message. Yes, every time--something that gets old quickly. Unfortunately, you can't customize these categories.You can't addi messages to a select recipient to a certain folder, while putting messages to another person in another location, for example. But Track Your Sent does add a button that appears on all new messages you create, allowing you to set its category and folder before sending it.

In addition to filing and categorizing sent emails, Track Your Sent also allows you to create calendar entries and tasks from messages you sent. These features are an all-or-nothing sort of thing, though, as you can only enable this option for every message you send. Again, here it would be nice to be able to customize this setting a bit, so you only created calendar entries and tasks when you really needed to.

Track Your Sent does include an option for dealing with messages that you reply to or forward. Its "Maintain Categories" option keeps you categories consistent, and stores them locally, so they're never revealed to your message's recipient.

While Track Your Sent could benefit from more customization options, it will help folks who rely heavily on Outlook email to manage to-do lists and their daily lives.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your version of Outlook.

-- Liane Cassavoy

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