HitMeLater: A Snooze Button For Your Email

I complain about my email inbox problems endlessly, and even performed a major purge a couple of days ago that wiped out over 23,000 unread emails. I don’t know what the solution is, but I think it may ultimately involve an admin of some sort despite my stubborn hope for a software solution to make things right.

While I wait for that startup/admin to fix my life, Philip Kaplan (my partner in my second best April Fool’s joke ever) (here’s the first) has built a cool new service that I will likely use in the meantime called HitMeLater.

HitMeLater is simple. Forward any email to 24@hitmelater.com and it will send it back to you 24 hours later, putting it on the top of your inbox pile. You can change the number of hours to anything you like, up to 1,000 hours ahead (3@hitmelater.com sends it back three hours later). Alternatively, put in a day (Wednesday@hitmelater sends it back the next Wednesday). If you send it something it doesn’t understand, HitMeLater sends back a polite email message saying “We’re not sure what you want.”

If you’re like me you rely on flags to remember which emails to go back to, but they often get buried and are left unattended. From now on I’ll forward stuff I need to deal with but not immediately to Sunday@hitmelater.com, my slowest email day.