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’re big fans of Gmail here at AwayFind.  The same can be said for the team behind Mailplane.  And now our products work together happily.

MailPlane allows Mac users to experience Gmail’s web interface with a few goodies on top, such as:

• Faster switching between email accounts
• Multiple (and rich-text) signatures
• Much better attachment management with OS X
• Growl & Notification Center notifications

In short, MailPlane brings a full desktop app feature-set to the Gmail interface for Mac OS X users.

And now it works with AwayFind!  MailPlane 3.0 isn’t quite released yet, but that’s what you’ll want to install for AwayFind.  Install MailPlane 3.0 Beta or read about it here.

Yahoo Mail is one of the most popular email providers.  And over the years, we’ve had thousands of Yahoo users whom we couldn’t support.  But now we’re excited to announce that all that’s changed!

For the last few weeks, we’ve been testing Yahoo Mail support, and everything is working great!

We welcome your feedback–go see it for yourself!

• If you have an AwayFind account you haven’t used in a while, try our setup wizard
• If you’re active with AwayFind, add your YahooMail account from Settings
• And if you don’t already have an account, try AwayFind for free today

Please note that we don’t presently support Yahoo Calendars, but are working on it.  The rest of AwayFind should function perfectly.

We’re especially excited that now so many who use AwayFind at work can monitor their personal Yahoo Mail accounts, as well.

Let us know if you have any questions.  Yahoo!

If you use Microsoft Outlook, you’re not alone.  And it’s hard to feel alone when you get new email pop-ups all day long.

How about turning those off?  Or even closing Outlook for a few hours?  With AwayFind for Outlook, it’s now a lot easier.

Install AwayFind for Outlook Beta
Works with Windows Outlook 2003-2010

With one click you can create AwayFind alerts.  Just “follow” a sender or a subject:

With one more click, you can specify that a particular person or topic notifies you in other ways, or expires after a day/week/month:

The alerts will be set on the AwayFind server, which means that they won’t have an impact on Outlook’s performance, and the alerts will be triggered even when Outlook is closed.

Install AwayFind for Outlook Beta
Works with Windows Outlook 2003-2010

If you use Outlook, you’re going to love creating SMS, Voice, iPhone, or Android alerts with AwayFind for Outlook. You just need a free AwayFind account to get started.

When someone emails you about an upcoming meeting, AwayFind automatically alerts you.  People really dig it:

For a long time, we’ve been able to notify you if someone emails you right before your appointment with them.  This way you’ll catch a last minute change, or notice that they’ll be late.  Nearly 1/5 of meetings get updated at the last minute!

But what if your appointment isn’t listed on your main work calendar?  What if they email you at a different email address?

It turns out that not only do many of you have packed calendars, you have multiple packed calendars and different email addresses.  And you need to know whenever something changes on any of them.  Now you can.

To enable multiple calendars takes just 60 seconds:

1. Visit your AwayFind Alerts page
2. Expand the People I’m meeting today section
3. Add the calendars you’d like AwayFind to monitor:

When someone emails you (at any address that AwayFind monitors) about an appointment on any of your calendars, you’ll be notified automatically:

So go on, live a full life.  We’ll keep you in the loop.

As we’ve made some big changes to our plans, we hope this FAQ will help to explain them a bit. You can also visit here for more background on why we’ve made these changes.

1. Am I affected by the new plans?

If you’re currently a Free user with an individual account (i.e., not an account for your whole company) then you will be migrated to our Basic Plan in early November. This new plan will have the following differences:

• You can receive up to 10 alerts of any kind per month (see below, “What are alert credits?”). After that you’ll need to upgrade, or wait until the next month in your billing cycle before you can receive up to 10 more.
• All your SMS’s will go through our high quality paid gateway, which increases the likeliness of their delivery, will be better formatted, and will come from the same phone number consistently.
• You can now send SMS notifications internationally.
• You can now check email at a Microsoft Exchange account.

If you are currently on the Monthly Start plan, you were just upgraded to the monthly version of our Pro plan, which means you now have all the features of our previous Pro plan (checking more email accounts and faster notifications) plus the new features that the old Yearly Pro users received with their upgrade.

If you are currently a Yearly Pro user, you are now part of the yearly version of the Pro Plan, which means the following upgrades for your account:

• You now can receive up to 1000 alerts, of any kind–Voice, SMS, iPhone push, etc.
• You will now receive instant alerts, rather than an alert after a few minutes.
• You will continue to pay the same price as before (which is at least $11 less than the current new Pro plan’s yearly version).

2. What are Alert Credits? Do I need to think about them?

Alert Credits, or the monthly alerts you’re allotted each month may be important to you. Any time you receive an alert–regardless of whether it’s by SMS, iPhone, Android, email, IM, Voice, or Twitter–it reduces your alert credits. In the past, we only tracked paid SMS and Voice notifications, but now all forms of notifications are counted equally.

If you are a casual AwayFind user, it’s likely that you receive fewer than 10 alerts per month. If that’s the case, then you won’t need to upgrade to continue using all the features of AwayFind you’re used to.

If you are an active AwayFind user, upgrading to the Personal plan will allow you to receive 100 alerts per month, which is about 5 alerts on any given workday–this is more than enough for the vast majority of our active users. In addition to being able to receive more alerts, you’ll also be notified about 4x faster when an urgent email arrives

If you are a big AwayFind user (we love you!), then you’ll want to check out our Pro plan, which allows you to receive 1000 alerts per month–which is enough for just about all our users (unless you’re using AwayFind as a dispatch service, it’s nearly impossible to send more than 40-50 alerts per day). Along with being able to receive more alerts, Pro users receive alerts nearly instantly when an email arrives.

There are other differences between our plans, which are summarized on our Plans & Pricing page.

3. If I run out of Alert Credits, what happens?

As you begin to run out of credits, we will send you an email to warn you. If you’re on the iPhone, we will warn you right from the device (with the ability to upgrade).  [update pending Apple approval, est. by Nov 7)

Please note that even if you cannot receive alerts, we will continue to process urgent messages and place them in your AwayFind Inbox, which is available on the web and in our Android/iPhone apps. We may change this in the future.

4. Why are Google Apps and Exchange available in the Basic plan but not in the Personal plan?

In addition to launching our new individual plans, we’ve today also announced our group plans, which are better designed to accommodate Google Apps and, perhaps in the future, Exchange plans.

For people who use AwayFind for business purposes, we’re continuing to design features that excel for business needs and come at a premium, but affordable, price. For people who only need one license but use Google Apps, we believe the $10 package which includes all the Pro features you will likely need is a pretty good deal. And the new AwayFind Gadget is (at the time of this writing) the best way to experience AwayFind in Gmail.

For our existing users who are concerned about this and would rather use AwayFind’s individual Pro plan, we’ve offered a hefty discount on our Pro plans for a limited time–if you haven’t received that (and you’re reading this in October 2011), please email us at support AT awayfind.com.

As time goes on, we will continue to offer different features to business customers. Our rates are either the same or have declined for our group editions, so we hope you’ll take advantage of them. We can’t promise that we’ll offer these prices in the future.

5. Why all the changes? I liked AwayFind before.

There are a number of reasons that range from serving a wider array of customers with our Basic package to providing an affordable package for our active users.

To read a lot more (and a more personal story) about these changes, here’s more background on this from our Founder, Jared Goralnick.