It’s a big day here at NudgeMail, as we are announcing a huge new feature – Google Calendar integration! It’s a great way to control Google Calendar through email and even gives you some cool ways to alert yourself of coming reminders.

With just a few simple steps, you can easily sync your NudgeMail reminders with your Google Calendar so all of your reminders appear right alongside your daily schedule. Starting today, you’ll be able to create Google Calendar reminders simply by sending emails to your favorite NudgeMail commands, and you can even receive SMS and push alerts for your reminders!

HOWEVER!!! We don’t (yet) have “full” control over your calendar, so you can only VIEW your NudgeMails in Google Calendar, you canNOT edit or delete them from there.  In fact edits done within Google Calendar will be completely ignored by the system – but please don’t take it personally.  We’re working on adding a bunch of advanced features in the near future.

To get started, visit www.nudgemail.com/gcal.

How you can use your new calendar:

Here’s what you CAN do:

• See all of your NudgeMail reminders in an easy to scan calendar format.
• Receive in-browser reminders ahead of important NudgeMails.
• Set up SMS alerts for all of your NudgeMail reminders via your Google Calendar.

Here’s what you CAN’T do (yet!):

• Edit or remove existing reminders directly from the Google Calendar (so, no dragging reminders around). To edit or remove reminders, just email status@nudgemail.com and then edit them from the resulting status email.
• Set new NudgeMail reminders directly within the calendar.

Please note that it may take a few minutes after you first set up the calendar for all of your reminders to appear. If you have any trouble, feel free to email us at support@nudgemail.com

In just the few weeks since we launched NudgeMail, we’ve received an incredible amount of user feedback on how we can continue to improve our little email productivity tool. Today, we’re happy to announce some really cool additions to NudgeMail based on that feedback.

What we are announcing today represents only a small portion of the overall NudgeMail improvements that will arrive in the coming weeks, so be sure to check the NudgeMail blog frequently to hear all the latest and greatest news as it happens. You can also subscribe to our blog via email here.

Now, onto the good stuff…

Recurring reminders!

Many of our users have been asking us to build recurring/repeating reminders into NudgeMail. Well, you asked for ’em, you got ’em. Let’s say you want to be reminded daily to submit that darn expense report from a recent work trip – try sending it to daily@NudgeMail.com. What about a weekly reminder to pick up essential groceries? Yup, weekly@NudgeMail.com. Need a reminder to call your parents every Friday? Just email everyfriday@NudgeMail.com. We’ve made it easy for you to send recurring reminders hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or even to specific days of the week. Check out the new commands below:

• hourly – (sends you a NudgeMail every hour on the hour)
• daily – (sends you a NudgeMail every day at your designated nudge time*
• weekly – (sends you a NudgeMail every Monday)
• monthly – (sends you a NudgeMail on the 1st of every month)
• yearly – (sends you a NudgeMail January 1st every year)
• every______@NudgeMail.com – (just put in your desired day of the week – monday, tuesday, wednesday, etc)**

* Your “nudge time” is set by default to 6:30 am. You can change your nudge time by emailing nudgetime@nudgemail.com and including your new nudge time in the subject line (see an example)

**You can also use short-form day commands like “everyfri” or “everytues”

NOTE: Because of this new feature, we needed to change the daily status commands to dailystatus@NudgeMail.com (on) and dailystatusoff@NudgeMail.com (off).

Better Date Recognition

Throughout our Beta, we’ve learned that No two people write dates exactly the same way. So, we could either fight human nature or make our system even smarter – can you guess which way we went?

• Go ahead and use slashes – You can now send commands using the formats (month/day/year)@NudgeMail.com (e.g. 8/18/11 or Aug/18/11)
• Hyphens are OK too – Yup, just send your email in the format (month-day-year)@NudgeMail.com and you’re set (e.g.12-25-10 or Dec-25-10)
• NOTE – International users must still turn on international mode before sending to an address that uses the day first. You can turn international mode on by emailing dayfirst@nudgemail.com. Once that’s done, you can send your emails to (day/month/year)@NudgeMail.com.

No More Colons Required

It used to be that, when you sent an email to Nudge@NudgeMail.com and put your command in the subject line, you had to put a colon after the command so our system could tell the difference between your command and the subject line. Well, no more! Now you can send your email to Nudge@NudgeMail.com, type your command in the subject line along with whatever you want to remember (“tomorrow pick up milk”) and your reminder will come back to you tomorrow with the subject “pick up milk”!

Use Noon for Those Lunchtime Reminders

Yup, we added noon@NudgeMail.com – why don’t you give it a shot?

International Improvements

NudgeMail is catching on worldwide and we’ve received great feedback from our international users. We are cranking away at a number of fixes that are not quite in yet (24hr time commands is at the top of that list) but we are happy to announce that we’ve made significant improvements to make NudgeMail even better for users outside the US.

• Date-specific emails can now be written in “day first” format. We made our system even smarter so you can now send us a command in the format 6Nov@NudgeMail.com, 23October@NudgeMail.com, or even 15Jan2012@NudgeMail.com
• Improved recognition of international characters
• Fixed confusing international date displays. If you have international mode turned on (email: dayfirst@NudgeMail.com) the dates in your reminder will now be displayed with the day first.

Status Email Enhancements

Many of our users said they love our “status@nudgemail.com” and “dailystatus@NudgeMail.com” commands, but they needed to see more of their subject lines to really know what NudgeMail they have pending. Well, we heard you and made this fix! Also, we noticed that some of you wanted to hit “send now” on an email in your status list, but didn’t want it removed from your queue. Well, now when you hit “send now”, you will receive your email immediately and it will remain queued up for your original reminder time.

Bonus Fixes

• Improved recognition of short commands, different command spellings, and typos. NudgeMail can now understand when you type: “a”,  “a.m”,  “a,m “, “a.m.”,  “a,m,”,  “am”, “p”,  “p.m”,  “p,m”,  “p.m.”,  “p,m,”,  “pm”, “mo”,  “month”,  “mnth”,  “mnths”,  “months”, “w”,  “weeks”, “wks”,  “week”,  “wek”,  “weks”,  “weeek”,  “weeeks”, “d “, “day”,  “days”,  “dys”,  “dy”, “h”, “hour”,  “hours”,  “hr”,  “hrs”.
• Enhanced system detection and sorting of NudgeMail. It’s all very technical, but NudgeMail basically got smarter about how it recognizing how you, our wonderful users, write your commands. We also updated some key reference points for our system so we can better store and sort your reminders for improved functionality.

We created NudgeMail for a simple reason – we really needed it.

Let me explain more fully.

I hate having a cluttered inbox. It bothers me. Maybe more than it should. Having a pile of messages staring at me whenever I checked my email really got on my nerves.

I am the Founding Partner of Stage Two, where I manage a handful of employees and a swath of clients. On any given day I can get anywhere from dozens to hundreds of emails (typically the latter). I do my best to deal with most of them, but many messages are simply not actionable right away. Messages that I needed to deal with later just sit in my inbox.

And they cluttered it up.

And they aggravated me.

It was hard to find messages when I needed to. Sometimes things would slip through the digital cracks. Did I mention the psychological angst associated with my cluttered, unactionable inbox? Oh, there was angst.

I tried setting up reminder systems but to no avail.  Either I had to remember to visit their web sites, or download plug-ins, or widgets, or apps, or in some way break from my flow of email.  Further, there weren’t any solid solutions that would fit across all my platforms (in my case an iPad, a home laptop, an office desktop, and an Android phone). This is key, because for me, email is the one guaranteed center of my business (and often personal) life.

Any time I had to leave email to find out what else was going on with my world, productivity started to dip.

I felt like I was working twice as hard to manage my email, my calendar and my online time manager.

It was too much effort for too little benefit. I needed something that was simple.

Like dead simple.

That is when I had the “A-HA” moment and created NudgeMail. An email based reminder service that took all the clutter out of my inbox and works across all of my devices. There is no software to download and no account to set up.

I am pleased to announce the private beta of NudgeMail, the easy, convenient way to send yourself email reminders. NudgeMail is completely secure and we will never access, sell, look at or distribute the emails you send through the system.

We built NudgeMail to help people organize their inboxes – fast.