If you are someone like me who communicates via email a lot, you would have noticed that it is important that your email reaches the person you want to contact at a specific time.

For example, one of my clients in Wayne, NJ (name withheld), comes to work at 10 and goes through all his emails first and then starts his day. I have been there several times at 10 when he comes and have seen him sending “quick replies” to pretty much everyone who emailed him to acknowledge their emails. I know that if I want to talk to him about something important via email that needs his action like a recommendation, referral or doing a research to get me some data, if I am one of the people who emailed him at 10, I will get a quick reply because he wants to move on to the next person.

So ideally, the best time to reach him is 10.30ish. But by 10:30am, I am already in the middle of my work and in some cases travelling to work or going somewhere from work. So I need an email scheduler that delivers the email when I want the email to be sent.

Similarly for some of your online customers. You are excited to share with them a new product that you want to just launched but you sent them an email on sunday, they will read the email on monday morning while their inbox will be piled up with other emails, so you will either be put on the side, or get a “quick reply” in response. So the timing of emails is very important in most cases. Not to mention, in a situation when you are out travelling or going to a meeting when a client of your’s is waiting for an email from you but you could not send it then because you are on the road.

Services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc do not have email scheduling available right now. The only feature they have is pre-write an email and save it to your draft, and then send it when you wish. Just a feature saying: send this email at xx/xx/xxxx at xx:xx PM will be a blessing.

Luckily there are several email management services on the web that allow you to schedule bulk emails (for eg, your list of cusomers, clients, site users, subscribers, etc). One of the good ones are Aweber Autoresponder & Email Management Service.

However, if you wish to send an email to one person, or a group of people who are NOT your subscribers, you can not use the above service.

So I am in the process of writing a software that allows you to schedule emails. This service will be free for you to use, however at the moment, you can only schedule emails to be sent to you (as reminders). So if you want to take a sneak peak, go to www.iwebnotifier.com and signup for your free account. Else you can subscribe to my list and I will notify you when the site is ready to use.

In the mean time I hope someone from Google reads this post and makes a suggestion to Google’s Gmail Team to add this as a feature. It will be a great asset to Emailers. However there can be some points of concern like Faking location, or something which can be overcome by adding a line to the email body that “This email was scheduled to be delivered at a future date and time”. So the receiver knows that this email was pre-written and sent at this time. I don’t see any problem with that, atleast we will be able to work better with that.

Will let you know when iWebNotifier is ready for launch. If you are interested in helping me design this tool, feel free to signup for a free account and let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.