When we decided to build Nudgemail almost 5 years ago, we did it for ourselves, because email as we knew it was broken. The cornerstone of modern communication was failing us in a big way and we found ourselves drowning in inefficiency.

The overflowing inbox, multiple accounts and daily reminder emails to ourselves were just too much, so we decided to fix it.  In developing Nudgemail, we wanted to design a service that was simple and secure, allowed us to reach inbox zero (or as we often say inbox manageable), ensure we never missed a follow-up or to-do, and have it work in a any email client with no downloads.  To that end, we’ll call Nudgemail a smashing success.

We absolutely love what we’ve built so far and it turns out we aren’t alone. Hundreds of thousands of people with the same issues have decided to give Nudgemail a try over the years. If you are one of them – thank you!

For four years we’ve called Nudgemail a “free public beta” with the announced intent to eventually charge for it.

We’ve changed our minds. As of this moment, Nudgemail is a free service. Forever* (drops mic, walks away from desk).

With email being such a huge part of how we communicate, we believe everyone deserves better email, without having to install a plugin or learn how to use a new email client.  We also believe that a platform as helpful as Nudgemail should be accessible to everyone for free.

So there you have it, as long as Nudgemail is available to the public, it’s going to be free.

But wait a second, you may be pondering to yourself “How are we going to keep Nudgemail as awesome as ever if it costs money to operate?” The answer is:  we’re really lucky to have some incredible users that want to make sure Nudgemail is here forever too. The outpouring of offers from folks asking us if they could pay while we were in Beta was overwhelming. And we’re going to take you up on those offers – it’s that love that will keep Nudgemail and the promise of better email free for everyone.

If you’re one of the many power users out there who have come to rely on the service the way we have, we’d love your support.  By donating a few dollars per month (or more than a few, should you choose), you’ll help make sure Nudgemail continues to make email better for years to come. Thank you in advance.

(*) – so it turns out Forever is a pretty long time, and it’s pretty hard to actually guarantee a thing will last forever (just ask anyone selling productivity tools to dinosaurs). So when we say Forever what we mean is this: as long as Nudgemail exists, you can use it for free. 

Dear Nudgers,

Thank you for your support over the years. For a long time many of you have heard “new stuff is coming” and, well, here it is. We’ve begun the server upgrade process, which will occur over the weekend of March 14th. During this time we don’t have a planned outage, but it is possible that we may see some downtime.

We’ve been hard at work on the “new Nudge” (don’t worry, mostly same as the old Nudge) for over 6 months now. During this time we’ve literally rebuilt the entire system on a more modern, more scalable, and more reliable architecture. This new platform will allow us to build more new features and services much more rapidly in the future. In the meanwhile, here’s what you should expect:

* More delivery accuracy: in the current Nudgemail you’ve probably noticed an 8am Nudge may arrive as late as 8:10am. In the new version, 8am means 8am. This is a huge improvement for those of you who rely on us for all of your to-do’s and reminders.
* Streamlined snoozebar: the original Nudge design was done over 4 years ago, with only minor tweaks since. Now get ready for a much simpler, cleaner, “flatter” look to all things Nudge. Further, if you ever need to forward a Nudged email, deleting the snoozebar from your Fwd will be much easier
* New logo! We love it, hope you will too.
* Mobile-friendly emails: The new template uses a “responsive design” and will look a lot better for anyone Nudging on their smart phones, or tablets, or watches (well, no guarantees on the watch – yet).
* Even less downtime: Since its launch in 2010, Nudgemail’s been up and running well over 99.99% of the time. But downtime as we know is painful. With the new platform, we expect even better performance moving forward.

It may take a few days to work all the kinks out of the new system. It’s really, really challenging to migrate our existing product to the new one, and not ask you to re-set all your Nudges, but we felt that was the only right way to go about things. So you may see a few oddities here and there, and not every Nudgemail command has the new template/logo on it yet. But if you have major problems, please let us know so we can get under the hood as fast as possible.

Also, as soon as we’re done with the full migration, we’ll get some new features coming your way. In addition to fixing Google Calendar integrations, we’ll be adding support for Attachments, launching a Chrome extension, offering an iPhone app, and more! We’ll share more updates about future plans as soon as we’re back to normal operations.

Thanks again for your support, your patience, and of, course, your Nudging!

Best,
Team Nudgemail

Hello fellow Nudgers! We have mixed news for you today, and, as is the way things are done, we’ll start with the bad.

Bad News: our integration with Google Calendar is disconnected, and will be until early 2015. GCal has gone through a recent technology change that requires significant labor on our end to make work properly.

Good News: this is only temporary, we are already working on it, and will be fixed.

We wish it could be fixed sooner and faster, but since we are so far along with our system updates, we have to wait until that’s complete first. Still targeting end of the year for that.

Sorry about the inconvenience, we know it’s been a popular feature for a lot of you. But go ahead, set a nudge for January and check back in to see when it’s fixed!

Also – for those of you who’ve asked if you can help us test the new features coming – yes – just give us a few more weeks to get them ready! Thanks again for the support!

Hello friends and fans of NudgeMail. Been a while – like 3+ years – since we’ve written a blog post. In fact, it’s been so long since we’ve last blogged we had to go double-check people were still calling it blogging! We’re going to try to get a lot better at it, but we’re a little rusty.

As we’ve tweeted about from time to time recently, there’s a lot of work happening at NudgeMail now. Here’s what we’re working on (in no particular order):

• Visual redesign – new and/or retouched logo, new NudgeMail email templates, and a new look and feel for the website too.
• Rebuilt architecture – you may remember a few outages this past Summer (we do, ugh). we’ve been rebuilding the back-end system to handle much larger scale, and more uptime as well (because our current 99.99% uptime is just not enough!).
• New features – whether it’s tiny new shortcuts or entire swaths of functionality (nudge a friend? YES!), there’s a lot more coming to NudgeMail this and next year!
• Pro services – as many of you have asked/guessed/surmised, we’ll be turning on the payments system soon. BUT, we’ll have some very very special deals for our loyal users.  Also, there will always be a Free level of NudgeMail use available to all.

Right about now, we’d love to get some feedback on some candidate logo designs.  If you have 40-50 seconds free, click here to fill out our survey and let us know what you think!

Here’s a neat video we made that shows people different ways to use NudgeMail. Hope you enjoy it!

If you want to make a NudgeMail video, drop us a link and we will show it off to the rest of our users.

The Next Web recently profiled NudgeMail in this Silicon Valley Uncovered video.

NudgeMail inventor Jeremy Toeman discusses email based reminders, natural language commands and “productive procrastination” in this segment.

We want to thank The Next Web for helping us spread the word about NudgeMail.

Some users have reported email delivery issues related to the recent Daylight Savings Time change and we wanted to bring it to our community’s attention.

We recently learned that several email reminders that were set up before the time change and scheduled for delivery after the time change have arrived at incorrect times. To fix this, users need to recreate these reminders now. There is no automated fix that we can implement on our end. Any new NudgeMail email reminders are unaffected and many users will not experience any problems at all. The issue only involves older NudgeMails for some of our users.

If your reminders aren’t arriving as scheduled, make sure that we know your time zone. This will ensure that your mail always arrives on time.

To set you time zone, send an email to settings@NudgeMail.com.

NudgeMail will reply with a list of settings for you to customize.

Click the link under “time zone.”

Press the button to save your settings.

If you are experiencing this problem, you can email status@NudgeMail.com to see a list of all active NudgeMails. However, the status list will likely appear to show the correct time. Know that if the reminder was set before the time change date and you are experiencing the problem, it will arrive an hour late.

Keeping you on time and organized is our main goal at NudgeMail. We are working on improving our system so this type of issue does not happen again. Thanks to everyone who reported this issue – we appreciate your support.

As a new company, a challenge we face is distribution and how to make sure people hear about us. After a NudgeMail user, well known tech journalist Rafe Needleman, asked if he could use NudgeMail to remind listeners to tune into his podcast, we realized not only was it possible, but a great way for people to hear about NudgeMail and try it out.

We’ve taken Rafe’s idea of linking to NudgeMail to remind listeners to tune in and created the NudgeMail Widget! The NudgeMail Widget adds a link to a web site that allows visitors to create a nudge that reminds them, via email, to check back in for new content at a certain day and time. This works great for NudgeMail because users don’t need to sign-up, login or learn how to do anything—simply send the email the widget creates.

Use the NudgeMail Widget to:

Remind your audience to tune in to your podcast
Help users remember to buy tickets for your show
Remind people who bought tickets to attend your event
Prompt readers to check your blog for new content

Starting today, you can create your own NudgeMail Widget for your site. With just a few simple steps, you can easily remind your visitors to listen to your podcast or watch your videos using NudgeMail.

To get started, visit www.nudgemail.com/widget, enter the date and time for the nudge, type the text you want in the subject line of the email from NudgeMail and copy the javascript to your page.

NudgeMail founder Jeremy Toeman recently appeared on the technology program Live Digital with Shelly Palmer. Jeremy highlights some core features of NudgeMail, including natural language commands (simply send an email to nextmonday@nudgemail.com and it will return to your in box next Monday). Jeremy’s interview is featured below and the entire episode is available here.

Special thanks to Live Digital and Shelly Palmer for profiling NudgeMail!