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!

NotifyMeNot walks you through the exact steps for turning off email notifications on social networking and other popular sites.  Here are some direct links:

• Turn off Facebook emails
• Turn off LinkedIn emails
• Turn off OkCupld emails
• Turn off Amazon emails

To be clear, there are some messages from these sites that you do want to receive, like personal messages sent directly to you, event invitations, notifications that your shipment was canceled, etc.  NotifyMeNot explains which email notifications you might want to keep, and how to do that, too.

Check it out, and keep those notifications at bay!

[NotifyMeNot]

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.

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!

That’s the fundamental principle behind AwayFind—getting away from your email, we find you when something matters now.  Thank you, Apple, for today exposing millions of people to these ideas with VIP for Mail.  For those who want a much richer & more powerful implementation of their product, you should consider AwayFind.

In a coming post, I’ll outline in depth the differences between Priority Inbox & VIP, and my suggestions for how to improve both products.  Here I’ll cut to the chase, and explain some of the core things that are possible with AwayFind, that are not possible with VIP:

• Contact Recommendations – the biggest challenge with VIP is setting up your VIP list. Could you come up with that list easily? Will you remember to update it? AwayFind generates a ranked list of the 25 people you reply to the fastest, and sends you an updated list every month. VIP offers no guidance, which makes setup difficult and the likeliness of missing an email very high.
• Calendar Alerts – We notify you when someone emails right before your appointment with them.  If you have a lot of meetings, you will absolutely love this.
• Flexible Contact Alerts – VIP only notifies you when a message arrives from a specific email address, rather than a domain or a name.  For instance, VIP cannot alert you when you receive an email from “nytimes.com” or “Friedman” – it can only alert you when an exact email match is found, like “thomas.friedman@nytimes.com.”
• Subject Alerts – sometimes a specific email discussion is very important, not an email address.  AwayFind can alert you based on email subjects, such as those with the word “Urgent” or “ASAP,” or one titled, “Proposal due tomorrow.”
• Custom Alerts – sometimes you need very specific conditions for being alerted—perhaps a message with the word “server down” in the body, but only sent to you
• Expiring Alerts – A person or discussion that’s important now, might only be important tomorrow. AwayFind allows you set expiring alerts that make a special alarm go off on your phone.
• Support for Outlook, Gmail, Google Apps – if you don’t use Apple Mail as your mail client, you can’t do anything with VIP in other email applications.  AwayFind supports the most popular desktop and web clients.
• VIP for Android – Got an Android device?  AwayFind has apps for both iOS and Android.
• SMS and Voice Alerts – Don’t have a smartphone?  Traveling without a data plan?  AwayFind can SMS or even call you when a critical email arrives.
• Delegation and Management – AwayFind can be configured to alert several people or across different channels (Voice+SMS+Android) when a really critical email arrives.
• Crisis Communications – Every AwayFind user receives a contact form they can provide to their colleagues.  When their colleagues fill it in, it automatically escalates a message into an AwayFind alert.
• CRM Integration – If you use Salesforce, you can create custom conditions for when someone is a VIP based on Salesforce data.  If you use another CRM, just let us know and we can work with you, too.
• Corporate/Central Management – VIP is a fundamentally personal/consumer tool.  AwayFind is a business tool, and it can be provisioned and managed across an entire organization.

As you can see, we not only offer many more features, but we’re much more likely to catch your urgent emails.  We support a wider variety of technologies, and we integrate much more deeply in a workplace.

So if you’ve tested the waters with VIP and want something more, take AwayFind for a spin today.

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.

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.

We’re happy to bring some of the best BlackBerry email features (and more) to the iPhone and Android platforms:

• Want your iPhone to alert you when your boss emails, but not when you receive a newsletter?  We’ve got that.  AwayFind will even let you know who you reply to the fastest, to help you set the list.
• Don’t want notifications after 8pm?  No problem.  You can set weekday and weekend schedules with AwayFind.
• Don’t want to kill your battery but do want alerts of important emails within seconds? Yep, AwayFind does instant PUSH notifications without your phone maintaining a constant connection to your email server.

Why is it difficult for iPhone or Android to do these things out-of-the-box?

BlackBerry is not just a phone, it’s paired with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).  The BES server connects directly to your mail server, and does the hard work of checking your email and preserving your settings.  BES only talks to the phone when the phone needs to know about something.  This places the BlackBerry in a better position to receive faster and more flexible notifications, with better battery life.

AwayFind, similarly, is not just an app.  Our servers do all the hard work of talking to Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Google Apps servers.  Our servers know when an email comes from important contacts, relates to an upcoming calendar appointment, or is part of a Salesforce opportunity.  AwayFind only talks to your iPhone or Android (via our apps or SMS) when there’s something the phone needs, using true PUSH.  This means AwayFind can do faster and more customized notifications than the native iPhone or Android phone applications, without being a battery drain.

At AwayFind, mobile email productivity is at our core.  We love our iPhones and Androids for their rich user experience and their broad base of applications.  We’ve built a product that lets you have both.

If you’d like to learn more about AwayFind, and join our 2000+ customers, feel free to contact us at enterprise@awayfind.com.

At AwayFind, productivity is our business and we don’t want you to miss your urgent emails.

Now you can get unlimited alerts from the people you invite to AwayFind who then sign up.  Even better, when they sign up, your contacts get unlimited alerts from you, too.

So go invite your boss to AwayFind.  And if they sign up, you can get unlimited alerts from them, and you can even get them sent instantly to you.  That’s the best of our Pro plan, as a thank you for introducing others to AwayFind.

Try it out — create an Alert for your boss or that important client from our new Alerts page.  With one click you can invite them to AwayFind.  When they sign up, you both win!

Pop quiz: who are these people?

Okay, this isn’t a quiz.  But at AwayFind, we have the answers.

Today we’re announcing AwayFind Recommendations.  Our recommendation engine bases priorities on both your history and your current response rate. We give you a list of who matters to you NOW:  
Perhaps you’re thinking: "this data is kind of interesting, but how can it help?"

See the Add button? Now, with one click, you’ll get an alert via text or our app when that person emails you.  Now you can really stop checking your email!

The important people in your life will change from time-to-time, of course.  At any point you can change your list with our iPhone & Android apps or Chrome/Firefox & Google Apps extensions. Our recommendation engine will also send you updated recommendations when those who are important to you has changed (every few weeks or months).

Sign up now, and let us send you recommendations and useful stats.

Already on AwayFind?  Check out your results here.