FollowUpThen Review: The Best Free Email Reminder Service

If you want to snooze selected emails or receive email reminders in your inbox, then I highly recommend FollowUpThen.

I recently started using FollowUpThen because the expensive email client, Hey Mail, lacks a way to snooze emails. It allows for setting aside emails for later reply or review, but for me that means clutter in my inbox.

Spark Mail (reviewed here), an email client I used before switching to Hey, includes a really great snooze feature that put emails back in your inbox when you needed them, but FollowUpThen offers some other features that I’m finding really useful.

I recently got turned onto FollowUpThen, a free or low priced premium service that both snoozes emails and sends email reminders and notifications.

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Why Snooze Emails

I snooze emails for several reasons:

• To review an email at a later time or day when I will most likely have time to read or respond to it.
• To remind me of a scheduled meetings in which the email contains information I will need for that meeting.
• To remind me of my deadlines for product sales or subscription payments.
• To remind me of particular tasks that include a link to a webpage that I need to review or open to complete the task.

Because I check emails at least twice a day, it makes sense to get follow-ups and reminders in my inbox rather than opening my task management system, ClickUp (reviewed here) to review them.

How FollowUpThen Works

FollowUpThen works with any email client, or mail server, because it hosts forwarded copies of your emails outside your mail client and sends them back when you schedule them to appear in your inbox.

For example, do you want an email returned to your inbox on the next day, then simply hit the forward button and address it to “tomorrow@FollowUpThen.com” Want an email snoozed until next Friday at 10am? Forward it to “Friday10am@FollowUpThen.com”

You can use FollowUpThen for any time and interval, including specific dates, two minutes, or two hours later or next year at specific time and date.

And because most email clients remember what addresses you type, the FollowUpThen addresses you previously type will reappear for you to select.

FollowUpThen also lets you schedule email reminders for your email recipients. For example in the cc field for an email, you might type “3days@followupthen” both you and your recipient(s) will receive a follow-up on the specified date and time.

Practice or Preview Schedules

To get the hang of scheduling reminders, you can go to the FollowUpThen website and practice typing various times, days, and dates.

When you sign up with FollowUpThen, you will be sent a link to add over 70 common schedule formats to your email system. But I chose not to use them, because they’re way more than I need.

I simply use a TextExpander snippet that expands right after the last character I type. So it’s easy type a new FollowUpThen.com schedule, which becomes a part of my Hey email system once I use it.

Recurring Tasks

In your FollowUpThen account, you can also easily and quickly create recurring reminders, tasks, SMS messages. These are features are for the premium subscription.

I’m using the recurring tasks to replace some of the recurring tasks and reminders in my ClickUp task manager. There’s no point of opening to ClickUp to get reminders and check off recurring tasks.

You can set up FollowUpThen reminders to include a subject title and message. So feel free to add URL link for sites or pages you need to visit on a regular basis.

Ironically, I set up a FollowUpThen reminder to check my News and Paper Trail Feeds in Hey. I now have a recurring FollowUpThen reminder me to check the feeds because when they go unreviewed, the emails pile up in the feed and it takes longer to review them. Maybe after a while I won’t need the reminders, but they come in handy for now.

Complete Tasks

Also, when you set up a FollowUpThen task reminder, the reminder that appears in your inbox will include options to postpone, complete, edit, or cancel the reminder.

Note, FollowUpThen says that the postpone feature doesn’t work with some email clients, such as “‘Gmail’ app on iOS, Mailbox for iOS and…some versions of the native Android mail client.”

Review FollowUps

You can also review all your email followups and recurring reminders in your FollowUpThen account. FollowUpThen can sort them based types of reminders. You can also delete and edit reminders from within the space.

If you find yourself creating lots of reminders and follow-ups, you can have FollowUpThen send you daily summary of your upcoming reminders.

Ugh, Another Subscription

The only drawback to use FollowUpThen is that, though it comes with a free option, it’s yet another subscription. The free option has has a few limitations, including retaining follow-ups for two weeks, and only 5 recurring tasks per month. The Personal free subscription also doesn’t include SMS reminders, calendar integration, other advanced features.

Spark Mail includes a built-in snooze emails system, and it’s all free for non-business users. But FollowUpThen has snooze features not available in Spark. If I return to Spark next year, it’s because I don’t want to pay $100(!) for the Hey subscription, and it will mainly be because of Spark’s snooze feature.

FollowUpThen Personal premium subscription is only $24 per year, which think is a very reasonable price for what it offers, especially because it works with any email client.

Conclusion

My productivity relies on using task management systems. Though FollowUpThen doesn’t help me with larger projects, the reminders and follow-ups I receive in my inbox are useful to get to getting things done.

Let me know if you decide to check out FollowUpThen, and what you think about the service.