Get free e-mail reminders from NudgeMail

On a typical morning, I wake up to more than 80 new e-mails in my in-box--and that doesn't even count the many more that are automatically filtered to several sub-folders, one of which receives around 70 messages per day alone.

Nor does that encompass the dozen or so messages sitting in my personal account. That's quite a lot of e-mail to sift through, especially for a person who cringes at the sight of unread messages in her in-box. But once I've marked them as read, it then becomes a chore to keep track of what needs a response and when. Incidentally, this is precisely the reason that NudgeMail caught my eye.

This handy service, developed by San Francisco-based consumer product experience firm Stage Two, is about as straightforward as they come, which is an integral part of its appeal (disclosure: Jeremy Toeman, a founding partner of Stage Two, is also a columnist for CNET). NudgeMail provides one feature: it turns any e-mail client into a reminder system. So say you receive a message that necessitates a reply, but not until Friday. Simply forward the e-mail to "friday@nudgemail.com" and, on Friday, the message will be sent back to you for response. You can also schedule items for particular dates; for example, for the 22nd of November, you would forward the message to "11222010@nudgemail.com."

It's really as simple as that. There are no registrations, no users, no widgets to toy with--just e-mail. And as many of us know, forwarding an e-mail is about the quickest and easiest process there is. Better yet, NudgeMail works from pretty much any platform--Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail...the list goes on and on. And it's completely free, at least for now. The service is currently in beta; once it goes live in prime time, the developer asserts that free users will still get a "limited but useful quantity of monthly nudges," while those who subscribe to the premium service will get unlimited nudges and extra features.