Funny I had been planning to build something like this. My idea was that you would forward an email to the service and just type in the start of it when you want the reminder. Using some simple NLP you'd be able to write something like "next week" or "on Monday" and the system would then email you back when it wanted to remind you.

No need to have your gmail password, or even be gmail specific.

Is there anyone out there who would use this? Enough yeses and I'll build it.

How would this detect whether you got a reply? Relying on the recipient to also CC the reminder service seems fragile and ugly, and having to proxy through another service also seems unwanted (you're now relying on that service to be available for you to receive email).

That's one of the things that etacts (http://www.etacts.com) does. Though when this was discussed here a few weeks ago in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144560 a lot of people seemed unhappy about it being an external service that needed to permanently store your gmail password.

I still really want that service. But my gmail controls access to everything and I cannot overcome the risk associated with divulging my password to a third party.

No bells and whistles on Gmail is worth risking the security of the email, and that is precisely what is being asked when we're asked to give our password to a third party. And there are examples of such abuse of trust, you only have to look at the court case about Facebook execs using passwords to login to email accounts of competitors.

So yes, etacts looks wonderful. But it doesn't offer something so compelling that I would give out my password. It's actually very hard for me to imagine what could be so compelling that I would give out that password.

A valid concern. This prompted them to implement oAuth for GMail, as described here http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/gmail-imap-etacts/ and discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172211 .

This seems really dysfunctional to me. "The ball is in your court, so I shouldn't have to do anything else..." and "right now, the person who follows up is the one who cares most about it." (not exact quotes)

Well, imagine you're on the receiving end, and it's an annoying email that you don't care to respond to. Do you want to keep getting automated repeats, where all the pain is yours, or do you want it to be somewhat painful for the person sending to have to take the time to re-send?

Yes, it's courteous to respond, even if to politely say "not interested, can't do it, go away." But to be auto-spammed if you don't!?

I already do this with five labels, one for each day of the week. A plugin would be far sexier and save me 10 seconds for each sent email, but the overhead I have right now is more than worth it.

You could put that together with this: http://3mindme.com/

Say: "I would like an email back about this email in 1 week."

Disadvantages to this:

* Your email goes out to them and gets stored for that long.

* You have to remember to include it as a bcc on every email you care about following up with.

* It doesn't automatically snooze if you get a followup.

* You have no way of tracking responses (in, say, a DB).

But it's a cheap solution that will do the job. Otherwise, there are special CRM packages for this. Unfortunately, I don't know much about them.

Even better would be to integrate the anti-shelving filter with a GTD app (I use Things) so that I don't have to create a separate task every time I want to create a followup reminder.

However, I would never want to send an auto-notification to the receiving party (often they're my customers -- how rude is that?).

I'd be annoyed if I was on the receiving end of the auto-reminder.

This may even be useful for Google Voice. After hanging up a call have an option to be notified after a period of time if you haven't received a call back from the phone number -- or email from that same contact.

I had the same idea just last week...

I think it is a great idea given the amount of mail i send and have to deal with. many times i just forget to make sure i received a reply, and sometimes when i do its just too late.

Those thinking of building something like that should check out http://www.clearcontext.com/pro/ that adds this feature in Outlook.

What's wrong with a "follow-up" or "waiting for reply" label?

"It’s adding to my load what should be in yours."

spam, how so?