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Get a one-year Boomerang for Gmail subscription for $39.99

Normally $49.99, this invaluable service lets you send mail at designated times and "snooze" messages so they reappear later on.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read
With Boomerang for Gmail, you can delay messages so they reappear atop your inbox at a later time.
With Boomerang for Gmail, you can delay messages so they reappear atop your inbox at a later time. Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

If you're anything like me, your inbox doubles as a kind of to-do list. You mark important messages as unread so you remember to attend to them later.

Just one problem: As more e-mail arrives, those unread messages get pushed farther down the list, until they're eventually out of sight -- and out of mind.

What you need is something akin to a snooze button, a way to delay important messages to a later time or date so they reappear when you're ready to attend to them.

Something like Boomerang for Gmail, a browser add-on that gives you that snooze button -- and more.

I've been a huge fan of services like this for quite some time. In fact, I listed a similar tool, FollowUpThen, among my list of three Web services worth paying for. But while that service will work with Gmail, Boomerang works a lot better because it's integrated. Everything works with a few clicks, instead of having to forward messages to special addresses.

Once you install Boomerang in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (sorry, IE users), just open any message in Gmail; you'll find a new Boomerang button in the toolbar. Click it to see your options for returning the conversation to your inbox: 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, tomorrow morning, 1 week, and so on. You can also select a custom date and time.

When you're composing a new e-mail, you can click Boomerang's Send Later button to choose when you want that message to be sent -- and even set it up as a recurring message (though only with a Professional subscription -- read on). There's also the option to "boomerang" the e-mail (i.e. bring it back to your inbox) if you don't get a response within a certain time frame.

Needless to say, these options can be incredibly useful -- and well worth paying for, in my humble opinion.

The developer offers Personal and Professional subscription options; I suspect most users will be happy with the former. It normally costs $4.99 per month, or $49.99 if you pay annually. And if you do, you can apply coupon code cheapskate for 20 percent off. (That code will also save you 20 percent, or about $30, on a Pro subscription.)

The coupon is good until August 25, and until then you can check out Boomerang Pro for free as part of a 30-day trial. In other words, you've got about a week to decide if you want to pay for a subscription. I suspect that once you start using Boomerang, you'll be hard-pressed to give it up.