Get the alerts you want, when you want them: you can now restrict when you receive alerts and whose calendar alerts to skip. And a whole lot more…
Alert Times
Your Important People and Topics might not be important all the time. While we’ve always allowed restrictions for receiving Custom Alerts, you can now set them for all* your alerts, and you have more flexibility in how you set them…
You can now set a schedule for when you’d like to receive alerts OR when you don’t want to receive them. This kind of flexibility means you can set different schedules for weekdays and weekends. Here are some examples:
- Always send alerts during the week, but never on weekends:
- Don’t alert me when I’m at work; instead, alert me between when I leave work at 6pm and when I come back at 9am. Do alert me during the weekends:
- Only alert me during business hours, during the week:
* These schedules only apply to your “My Important People” and “Topics I’m Following.” Custom Alerts and Calendar Alerts have their own restrictions.
Calendar Exceptions
Our users that have a lot of meetings love our Calendar Alerts, but some of them have too many appointments with a ton of attendees…and thus they find themselves getting too many alerts. We partially addressed this a couple months ago by allowing you to set the alert window to 15 minutes or 30 minutes (our smallest alert window used to be 1 hour). But now you can actually restrict alerts from certain people!
In the “People I’m meeting…” row, click the double arrow on the right to expand the section. Then where it says, “Ignore emails from:” enter the names of the people who you meet with regularly enough that you don’t want alerts when they email you right before the appointment:
In the example above, I’ll be notified when anyone emails me within one hour of my appointment with them…except for john@gruber.com and mike@arrington.net’s emails.
Other Updates!
If you’re keeping tabs on our progress, we also released several small but important enhancements in the past few weeks:
- Our browser plugins now authenticate directly through Google Sign-On, which make it easier to connect and more secure
- In My Important People, we now auto complete based on your top contacts:
- You can now access all your purchase history:
- And with bigger enterprises using AwayFind every day, we’re continually upgrading our security and improving our policies to ensure that our site remains reliable and your data will never be compromised (disclaimer: to the best of our ability)
We hope that these updates make it that much easier to escape your inbox!
We never expected that the #1 reason enterprise customers contact us is to replicate BlackBerry email alerts on the iPhone. BlackBerry was designed from the ground up as a mobile email tool, and it’s difficult to replicate its features on iPhone and Android devices. 
