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Make Google Calendar Appointments by Email? Yes You Can!

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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

NudgeMail – Now With Even MORE Ways to Set Recurring Reminders!

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While all of you have been busy setting NudgeMails, we’ve been busy adding more features.  We introduced recurring reminders a few weeks back, but now due to popular demand/use, we’ve made them even better. Setting these repeating reminders is fast and easy and offers a great solution for tasks that recur every day, week, month or year. Our favorite uses so far of recurring NudgeMails?

  • Birthdays, anniversaries, and other things you really shouldn’t be forgetting
  • Taxes, bills, and other major recurring payments (though they aren’t as much fun as the birthdays)
  • Things you need to “check in on” on a periodic basis
  • TV shows you want to record/watch
  • Weekly grocery purchases
  • Feeding the meter?

If you have anything we should add to the list, comment below!

Here’s the full commands list, with explanations.

Hourly: hourly@NudgeMail.com

Your NudgeMail will be sent to you every hour on the hour.

Daily: daily@NudgeMail.com

Your NudgeMail will be sent to you every day at your set Nudge Time. (The default Nudge Time is 6:30AM and changing it is as simple as sending an email to nudgetime@NudgeMail.com with the desired nudge delivery time as the subject line.)

Weekly: every(dayofweek)@NudgeMail.com

Send your email to everymonday@NudgeMail.com or everywed@NudgeMail.com. It works with all of the days of the week, and abbreviations work just fine (mon, tues, wed, thurs, etc).  Your NudgeMail will be sent to you every week at the set day, arriving at your set Nudge Time.

Monthly: monthly(#dayinmonth)@NudgeMail.com

Send your email to, for example, monthly5@NudgeMail.com and your NudgeMail will come on the 5th day of the month, every month (again, at your set Nudge Time).  If you don’t pick a day of the month, emails sent to monthly@NudgeMail.com will come on the first of the month.

Yearly: yearly(#dayinmonth)(monthname)@NudgeMail.com

This might seem a little trickier, but it’s not, just a little longer to type.  An annual reminder for every September 30th should be sent to yearly30sep@NudgeMail.com, and one for Feb 14th (we all need reminders for that one) goes to yearly14february@NudgeMail.com.  You must specify both the day of the month and the month itself for this to work (in other words, yearlymarch will *not* send a nudgemail to you every March 1st, you must use yearly1march for that to work).

Add Specific Times

You can also add a specified delivery time for all recurring reminders.

For daily, weekly and yearly reminders:

Just add the desired delivery time at end of the email commands above, without any colons in the time! Be sure to include “am” or “pm” at the end of your time setting, unless you use military time (so, either 230pm or 1430). Examples below:

For monthly reminders (a little different):

IMPORTANT: For monthly recurring reminders you have to put a period between the date and the time.
ALSO, like above, you must NOT use a colon in the time.  Examples below:

  • The 7th of every month at 3:00pm – monthly7.3PM@NudgeMail.com
  • The 10th of every month at 2:18am – monthly10.218am@NudgeMail.com
  • The 30th of every month at 3:30pm – monthly30.330pm@NudgeMail.com

Why do we need the period? Without it, our system would see a command like “monthly73pm” and get a little confused as to what time 73 PM is.

By the way, for those using the nudge@NudgeMail.com method of setting your NudgeMails, all of the above will work in the subject line.

We hope you enjoy these new recurring reminders from NudgeMail and use them to better manage your tasks and your inbox.  Later this month we’ll get another feature your way that we think you’re going to like.  A lot.

How To Make SpamArrest Work Well With NudgeMail

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Let’s face it, spam is very possibly the worst thing about the Internet (whereas the double rainbow song might be one of the best things about the Internet), and more and more folks are using spam blocking tools to help with their inboxes.  Some of our wonderful Beta testers have asked about how they can make their fancy spam catching services play nice with NudgeMail.  So this post is the first in a series of How to Make <your spam blocking software of choice> Play Nicel With NudgeMail.  First up:  Spam Arrest.  Note that we are not explicitly endorsing any one spam blocker over another (yet), and will profile as many services as we can find.

We’re happy to report that there is a pretty easy fix. What follows is a quick step by step rundown that shows how to make Spam Arrest recognize your NudgeMail as a friend, not a foe.

Even if you don’t use Spam Arrest, chances are these tips will lead you in the right direction for your program of choice as well.
If you ever need more help, please feel free to contact us at support@NudgeMail.com.

Step 1: Log in to your account at www.spamarrest.com


Step 2: Go to the tab at the top of the page marked “Senders.”


Step 3: From the left bar, choose “Domains.”

Step 4: Simply enter “nudgemail.com” into the domain box and click “Authorize Domain.”


You’re all set! Now you should have no problem receiving your handy reminders when you want them!

New Features (hello recurring nudges!) + Some Fixes

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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.

Take a Break From Work Email this Thanksgiving!

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We saw this article today that estimates 59% of people will check their email on Thanksgiving Day.  Background data comes from a user survey from hot email startup Xobni.

Now some of them will be downloading family snapshots and holiday recipes, but more than likely most folks will be checking in on office business to make sure that they didn’t miss anything on Turkey Day.

Thanksgiving is a day for family, football and food (and, of course, giving thanks). To those 59% of you planning to play email tag with your clients on Thursday, why not use NudgeMail to send yourself email reminders on Friday, instead.

Or better yet, try Monday@nudgemail.com.

Happy Thanksgiving from Nudge!

Results from our first user survey

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It’s been two weeks since our launch (already? time flies!), and we decided it was important to get some user feedback.  So we randomly surveyed 1000 users, and received just over 600 responses.  That response rate alone was amazing.  Even more amazing?  How much our users seem to like our service.  Here’s the results (images courtesy of Google forms):

1. Are You Still Using NudgeMail?

Wow. Just about 90% of respondents say they are still using it.  Granted those who aren’t using it probably ignored our survey for the most part, but still, it’s an encouraging answer!

2. How often do you send NudgeMails?

The first option was “less often than once per week”, second was “once per day”.  Which means about 1/3 of our users are 1-10/day or more, and 2/3 should be considered infrequent users.  Seems about right, as it can take a while for people to figure out how to apply NudgeMail for their own personal workflow – more on that below.

3. What do you use NudgeMail for? (check all that apply)

The missing word (thanks Google, but since your service is free I shouldn’t really complain) for the first two was “reminders”, the last one was “inbox empty”.  This is an important question, as the thing we’ve clearly learned already is how distinct individual users’ email and workflow patterns are.  What works amazing for one person is someone else’s worst nightmare, etc etc.  Interesting for us to note was how little people are using it for “Inbox Zero” efforts (for now).

4. How helpful do you think our website, www.NudgeMail.com, has been in getting you going on NudgeMail?

This is an area we know we have to work on, and the answer is again fairly biased by the respondents – those who are using and loving the service are clearly more likely to have found the website useful.  As we look to improve we’re highly focused on making sure it’s just drop-dead simple for anyone to try out NudgeMail and see if it does fit into their own flow.

5. How easy has it been for you to set reminders using NudgeMail?

This corresponds really well with our error logs, as people have adopted the system, they do seem to “get it”.  Which raises the question of whether or not it’s self-defeating for those who had trouble with their first experiences.  We’ll be paying a lot of attention to this too.

6. How easy or difficult has it been for you to see and change your NudgeMail settings?

Probably the most complicated part of NudgeMail so far is getting users to understand that they can change settings.  The downside to an all-email-based system is that we are limited to all commands happening via email.  We love the elegance, but yet it still reinforces the upside to enabling some form of console/control panel via the NudgeMail.com website.  Added to the to-do list (aka I sent myself a NudgeMail on it).

7. Overall NudgeMail experience so far?

Drumroll please… Yes, the 5 was “excellent”.  Huzzah – we’re at 80% of surveys giving us a 4/5 or 5/5 on overall experience.  And we’ll sleep very soundly on our pillows for just a few minutes tonight, then back to work.

Conclusions/Final Takeaways

We built NudgeMail for people with (a) problems with other reminder/to-do systems and/or (b) problems managing their inboxes.  We’ve been drinking a decent amount of Kool-Aid internally, though knew full well that only a certain percentage of people would find a need for our service.  Beyond the basic analytics, we wanted to get our first feedback from the users themselves, and it’s quite encouraging. So… Thanks!

We have a lot of new stuff coming soon, including some asked-for features, some bug fixes, and a few other things we’ve been toying around with.  Will probably have our next update later this week!

Why We Created NudgeMail

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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.

Benefits (Home Page)

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Remember everything!
Seriously, whether it’s following up on a good lead or picking up your anniversary present, with NudgeMail you have no excuse.

Works in your email
Using NudgeMail is entirely done within email, which is the way you do all of your other work. No need to go to a website, just keep working the way you are used to.

No need to register
NudgeMail has no sign-up or sign-in, no passwords, no usernames, no software, apps, plug-ins, downloads or any other barriers to keep you from setting reminders. It just works.

Reduce email clutter
Inbox clogged with stuff you gotta do later? NudgeMail lets you set reminders by the hour, day, week, month, or even year so you can decide when to deal with important emails.

Works at home or
on the road
NudgeMail has been tested with almost every email-capable device in the world.

NudgeMail brings you one step closer to 100% email efficiency!

Options (Home Page)

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There are 2 easy ways to get started fast with NudgeMail:

1. You can send any email to nudge@NudgeMail.com with almost any reminder time in the subject line.

2. You can also forward any email to almost any reminder address (tomorrow@, friday@, nextweek@, 1h@, and many more) to get your NudgeMail back when you want it!

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