One feature which I miss in Gmail is the ability to schedule emails so that they go out at a certain time. Scheduling emails is similar to scheduling tweets in Twitter but scheduling emails have a lot more advantages. One of them is that you get an opportunity to review and correct mistakes in your messages before they go out (which do happen at times).

Gmail does not allow you to schedule emails as of now, and they might not do that in near future. However, Gmail does offer users with an option to undo send a message for up to 20 seconds. Nevertheless, it would always be nice to have a feature which would allow you to schedule your email messages too.

In comes Boomerang, a Google Chrome and Firefox add-on which allows you to schedule email messages to go out after a certain period. As you can see from the screenshot above, Boomerang allows you to schedule messages to go out after a set time and even allows you to schedule an exact time for the message to go out.

Once you schedule the message, Boomerang will store the email headers on their servers and send it out at the specified time. Pretty neat solution for an online email service.

Boomerang’s usability does not just end with scheduling email messages in Gmail, it also allows you to de-clutter your Inbox by hiding certain emails and only displaying it after a certain time. For example, if you get an email from someone about something you have to do tomorrow, you might star that email or add it to your TODO list. However, Boomerang will allow you to hide the email message for now and show it in your Inbox at a specified time.

This can come in very handy when you receive a bill and have to pay it after few days, you can have Boomerang show that message in your Inbox after few days so that you remember to pay the bill on time.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Boomerang would cause several users to freak out about privacy since it has full access to your emails. However, the company makes it clear that they only store the email headers of a message on their servers so that they can identify it, and do not store the email body.

Other than that, Boomerang adds a very impressive feature to the already impressive Gmail and also helps you to de-clutter your Inbox and view important messages when you want to. Overall we would highly suggest our readers to try this out.

Though Boomerang is invite only, the link below might allow you to download the extension for Google Chrome and Firefox.

Rating: 4.5/5 (Excellent)

Update: Download link no longer works, just head over to http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/ and use the invite code “techiebuzz” without the quotes to download the extension.

Download Boomerang [via TNW]