Sandy personal email assistant – Get free email reminders for birthdays, appointments, etc

Posted on November 26, 2007 at 3:02 pm

Need a personal email assistant for managing your daily tasks, appointments, or reminders? Whatever system you’re using for your email, a girl named Sandy can probably help you! Sandy is actually a web site that you can use as a kind of personal email assistant by sending her requests to remind you of events and tasks that you need to attend to.

Sandy’s purpose is not to change your current email system at all, it’s simply there to make it better so that you can concentrate on other things. If you’re on a BlackBerry, a hardcore Google Calendar user, etc, you will find that Sandy can help you out. A lot of times people need to remember small things, like taking their vitamins or sending a gift to someone, etc, but it’s not worth creating and using a large scale to-do list type of system.

However, with Sandy, you can remember all of those little things without too much effort. Here’s how it works: send an email to a unique address that you will receive once you sign up with something that you want Sandy to remind you of later. The really cool thing about Sandy is that you can send reminder requests in plain English, like the following:

Remind me to move my car in 10 minutes
Remind me about my Yoga class on Tuesday, 8-9am @weekly
Remember Patricia Jenter, 503-555-1212 @momsgroup
Remind us to call Mom on her birthday on 9/16/07 @yearly @birthday
Remember to read http://www.43folders.com tomorrow
Remind Jeremy to take out the trash Sunday evening @weekly

You should start off the email or text message with the work remind or remember. This cues Sandy that it is something she should record into the system. You’ll also notice another nice feature that makes Sandy so useful: tags! Using the tags at the end, i.e. @weekly, @yearly, you can have that reminder sent to you automatically in the time period you specify.

So next time you are at a party and someone tells you their birthday, just have Sandy’s email address as a contact on your phone and send a text message with something like “Remind Julie Sander BDay 10/20/07 @yearly @birthday” and you’ll never forget it again! If you start using the service a lot, you can create template text messages on your phone for birthdays and other things.

You’ll also notice above that you can create groups of reminders by specifying any name you like after the @ symbol. The third example above has the @momsgroup at the end of it. When you go online and log into your Sandy account, you can see reminders by tags. This helps to organize tasks and appointments into categories, etc.

The remember feature is really nice because there are so many times someone tells you their cell phone number or something that you need to do, but by the time you start doing something else, you have already forgotten. Sandy can understand multiple time formats,

12- and 24-hour time (1:30pm; 13:30)
Specific dates (May 14, 2007; 5/14/07; 5.15)
Relative dates (today; tomorrow; next Thursday; Thu; next week)
Date ranges (May 14-16; 10/14-10/22)
Time ranges (1-4pm)

You can also do lookups, which are useful if you need some information quickly, but can’t access your computer. For example, you can say “lookup John Doe” or “lookup @mytag”. The first one will send back anything that has that text whereas the second one will return everything with that tag.

Other special tags that you can use with Sandy are as follows:

@todo – Added to the list of things you want to get done and will be sent in your daily digest every morning until completed.

@done – Tagging an item with this will mean the item from the todo list is completed.

@archive – Will be removed from any active lists or lookups. Reminders will not be sent either.

You can read more about the other tags and how to use Sandy by checking out the help guide.

[tags]email reminders, email reminder service, free email reminders, reminders by email, birthday email reminder, automatic email reminder, email appointment reminders, appointment reminders, reminder service[/tags]

» Filed Under Cool Websites

Comments

6 Responses to “Sandy personal email assistant – Get free email reminders for birthdays, appointments, etc”

Nirmal said on : November 29th, 2007 at 6:34 am

Initially this service would be wonderful, but when you get into busy work schedules, these mails could be frustrating, it happened with me, it was not actually the mentioned service.

akishore said on : November 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Nirmal,

That’s a good point. But I guess if you’re really busy, you might be getting a lot of emails anyway? I think anyone who is busy needs some kind of reminder service, not sure if this is the best though.

DemoGeek said on : December 4th, 2008 at 11:09 am

Would rather prefer a mobile alert than just an email.

Free online PC computer-tech and software help from real people Says:

[...] example, just yesterday I wrote about a really cool web service called Sandy, which acts like a personal email assistant by helping you remember things. If you look at the front page of GetSatisfication, you’ll see one of the products that [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
ReQall - Free Reminder Service Says:

[...] have recall my previous article on Sandy personal email assistant, which you can use to setup free reminders for birthdays, etc or Jott, a really cool service where [...]
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:12 am
CC:Betty – Sandy personal email assistant reborn Says:

[...] remembers Sandy right? I wrote about Sandy Personal Email assistant almost two years ago, before it decided to shut its doors. Sandy was useful for managing daily [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:32 am