Like many in the domain industry, I’m a part-time domainer balancing a full-time job. After a day of work, spending time with the kids and getting them to bed, the typical business hours have long past. This is when my domaining time begins. It’s either late night, very early in the morning, or both. I love it, so please don’t misinterpret this as a complaint. I found something I truly enjoy so it’s not work to me at all. But holding these inconsistent hours does present a challenge.
Let’s say your a owner of a widget company. You get to work on Thursday morning at 7:00am and check your email. There, you find a message from Mike Sullivan asking if you’re interested in acquiring WidgetMaker.com. You glance up at the time the email was sent and it says 1:14am. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but to some, I may lose credibility for not looking like I am a legitimate business. Much of the mail I receive in the wee hours tends to be spam, so I understand the concern. The thought has plagued me until I decided to see what my options are available.
I actually found quite a few free tools that would allow me to create emails and schedule them to send at a later date and time. But most require that I send the email to the service at the assigned email address, and then they would resend at the time and date I specify. Easy enough, but I think receiving an email during regular business hours but with some header is probably worse that the 1:14am email. The result I landed on is a free service called Boomerang from Baydin Software. At this point, I want to take a moment to say that this is not a sponsored post. I will always disclose to you when a post is sponsored.
I’m a Gmail user and Boomerang is specifically for Gmail. It’s a browser plug-in for Firefox and Chrome that adds a new “Send Later” button to your Gmail page, as if it belonged there. This allows you to create the email and send it at a later, scheduled date and time or to select from the other available defaults. The beauty of it is that it uses the Gmail server so I’m not going to end up with some suspect header on my outgoing mail.
Now I can prepare my domain solicitations late at night or on the weekend and send during regular business hours, maintaining a more professional business appearance. Boomerang is in closed Beta, but Baydin has allowed me to provide a link to the plug in. All current SullysBlog.com subscribers will receive the link as well any new subscribers for a limited time.
44 comments
Thanks Mike.
I too am a big fan of gmail and sometimes wonder if certain companies reject gmail.com, as spam?
I will look into and install the Boomerang link as well.
Best,
Dale
@Dale, I haven’t heard of any gmail spam issues, but let me know what you uncover. I use my business domain when sending out sales emails, but gmail lets me send using my business address instead of the gmail address.
Be sure and test by sending such an email to yourself to ensure that the timestamp shown to the recipient is indeed the time you want them to see — I’ve seen several services that will delay the time that the email is sent to the recipient but the timestamp is the time you pushed “send”. Obviously, not much help there.
We have MS Small Business Server for our email and it has this feature built into it, which is nice; but, we’re a company so a domainer doing this in their spare time would need a service more like Boomerang. It’s too bad that Boomerang only works for Gmail because gmail.com still isn’t very professional — it’s a freebie email account. It’s far better to have your own domain name with email coming from it and a website that the recipient can go out and look at to see what you say about yourself. If you’re just using gmail and have no website, it looks pretty spammy. My $0.02.
@Logan, I agree about it being better to have your own domain email. Gmail allows you to do that as well.