21 March 2014

How to Schedule your Email Messages in Gmail with a Google Sheet



Have you ever wanted to write an email now but send it a later date and time? Maybe you are sending birthday greetings and would like the email message to be delivered on the exact day. Or you have written the reply to an email but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.


Microsoft Outlook has a built-in scheduler to help you delay the delivery of email messages. After you are finished writing an email message and hit the Send button, the message isn’t delivered immediately — it stays in your outbox and is sent at the specified time automatically.


Gmail doesn’t let you schedule a later delivery of email messages but there are browser extensions — like Boomerang and Right Inbox — that let you specify a future send date for your outgoing email messages.


These are however subscription based services that allow you to send only a limited number of scheduled email messages for free per month. The other concern is privacy – you will have to grant read and write access to your entire Gmail account to a third-party to use scheduling inside Gmail.


How to Schedule & Send Gmail Messages Later with Google Sheets


If you are reluctant to provide access to your Gmail account to another service, there’s an alternative – Google Sheets.


What you can do is compose all your emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in the Google sheet. The messages would be delivered automatically at the time chosen by you. Internally, there’s a little Google Script that takes care of sending the messages at the appropriate date and time.


Schedule Gmail Messages


Schedule your Gmail – Step by Step


Go to your Gmail mailbox and compose a few test messages that you would like to be delivered later. Your draft messages can have rich formatting, you can add attachments, signatures and even inline images. Make sure that you have included the recipient’s email address in the TO field of the drafts.



  1. Click here to make a copy of the Gmail Scheduler sheet in your Google Drive.

  2. Open the sheet, choose Authorize under the Gmail Scheduler menu and grant the necessary permissions. This script is running in your own Google Drive and none of your data is accessible to anyone else.

  3. Choose Gmail Scheduler -> Fetch Messages to import all the draft messages from your Gmail account into the Google Sheet.

  4. Set the scheduled date and time for individual messages in column D of the sheet. You can double-click a cell and use the date picker or you can manually enter the date and time as m/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss in 24 hour format.

  5. Go to Gmail Scheduler -> Schedule Messages and run the scheduler. You can close the spreadsheet and it will send messages at the specified time automatically.


Video Tutorial – Schedule Gmail Messages


Here’s a detailed video tutorial (download) that will walk you through the steps.



Scheduling Gmail messages with Google sheets is easy. Please do note that once a message has been scheduled, you should not edit the corresponding Gmail draft message else that particular message would be removed from the queue.


If you wish to edit the draft or need to change the delivery time once the messages have been scheduled, you can repeat the steps #3 to #5 and reinitialize the queue.


Also, the scheduled date and time that you specify in the cells use the default timezone of your spreadsheet. If you wish to send mails in a different timezone, open the spreadsheet and pick a different timezone under File -> Spreadsheet Settings menu.


Awesome Google Scripts → Google Scripts Developer →




This story, How to Schedule your Email Messages in Gmail with a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 21/03/2014 under GMail, Internet

Four Of The Best Text Editors For Your Chromebook



happy-notepads

Do you miss having a simple text editor on your Chromebook’s OS? Although Google scrapped its native app, there are still alternatives available. As of today the only native text app for a Chromebook is Google Docs. While it works brilliantly as a replacement for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, it is not so effective when you want to make a quick list or do some basic text editing. The inability to save files locally can be a hindrance when you’re away from a Wi-Fi signal and the permanent syncing to Google Drive can be frustrating if you’re only making simple...


Read the full article: Four Of The Best Text Editors For Your Chromebook



My WordPress Blog Could’ve Been Hacked – Detectify Saved Me



wordpress-security

If I told you that there’s one place you can go to get peace of mind that your website is secure, would you believe me? Well you should, because there is. It’s called Detectify. I’m the kind of website owner that has always sort of been in denial. It can’t happen to me. Why would anyone ever want to hack my site? Well, all those delusions came crashing down around my head in 2011 when the main PHP file of my home page was replaced with a web page announcing that the site had been successfully hacked. Not only was...


Read the full article: My WordPress Blog Could’ve Been Hacked – Detectify Saved Me



Konami Easter Egg in Google Voice Search



There's a cool Easter Egg in Google Voice Search: if you say "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", Google will answer: "Cheat mode unlocked, unlimited free Google searches". This is the Konami cheat code originally used for Nintendo games.



You can try this Easter Egg in the Google Search app for Android and iOS and in the Google Search site if you use Chrome for desktop.






The Konami code was also used as an Easter Egg in Google Reader, Play Games and even for the Chromebook Pixel.



{ via Search Engine Land and Pierre Far }

Microsoft Snoops, Turkey Twits, Qik Quits, MtGox Finds, Samsung Slams [Tech News Digest]



private-property-sign

Today in Tech News Digest, Microsoft looks in Outlook, Turkey bans Twitter, Qik is killed off, a Fitbit class-action lawsuit, MtGox finds missing Bitcoin, Facebook needs you for beta testing, and Samsung snark. Microsoft Can Look In Your Outlook Microsoft has the legal right to search through your emails, and it’s retaining that right despite user complaints. However, in light of the backlash prompted by the original revelation, the company is tightening its own rules to appease concerns. We found out Microsoft can snoop through your inbox after court documents showed the company did just that while investigating Alex Kibalko....


Read the full article: Microsoft Snoops, Turkey Twits, Qik Quits, MtGox Finds, Samsung Slams [Tech News Digest]



Download Windows 7 SP1 Home Premium And Ultimate ISO From Microsoft



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In one of our previous posts, titled how to download Office 2013 from Microsoft using a product key, we discussed how to legally download Office 2013 setup from Microsoft by entering a genuine product key. The guide is useful for those who have lost their Office DVD and also for those who are having issues […]

Language and Region Filters for Google Alerts



Google Alerts now lets you pick the language and region when creating an alert. For example, you can create an alert for "Chrome", but restrict it to French news articles from France. You don't have to set the region, the default setting is "any region".






The new filters are great for delivering more precise results, since you can restrict the results to a language, a country or both. You no longer have to use workarounds and switch to a different domain to get alerts in a different language. Please note that the text from the Google Alerts message will be in the language you've picked.





Google's Truncated Titles



The Google Search experiment that increased titles and removed underlines from links was quickly added to the regular search interface last week. Now it's no longer an experiment.



While I don't miss underlines, making titles bigger removes a few words from long titles and that's not a good thing. Here are some search results for [google maps api]:



* "Google Street View hack turns your city into a post-apocalypt..." (full title: "Google Street View hack turns your city into a post-apocalyptic jungle")



* "Google puts a limit on free Google Maps API: over 25,000 da..." (full title: "Google puts a limit on free Google Maps API: over 25,000 daily and you pay")






As you can see from these examples, only a few words are removed, but the truncated titles are difficult to understand.



Here's a side-by-side comparison between the new layout and the old one:






From what I know, Google has never displayed a few characters from a word in search results titles. Now it has to do this.