ForLater | Reminder Emails for Forgetful People Like Me
Tim April 16th, 2007
Forlater has a very simple service that actually comes in quite handy. Setup an email to be sent in the future. This could be used to remind yourself of important events or memos, or you could also decide to send yourself an email 2 years from now as a sort of time capsule for the web. No fancy signups or web 2.0 graphics. Just a basic service that builds on a simple idea. Let’s give it a try.
1. The first thing I love about Forlater is that they don’t waste your time with a splash page of any sort. Right from the homepage we can see everything we need about this service. We have an explanation of the service, a form to fill it out, and only two extra links for information.
2. As I went to fill out a quick note about a meeting I have later I ran into a few issues. First of all the time and date settings are European. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the time zone setting completely confused me. Honestly how many people know right off the bat where they stand with GMT time zones. I didn’t, and there was no preview to make sure the time I entered was going to be correct. Also I somehow got the captcha spam blocking filter wrong the first time, even though the letters seemed pretty clear. Eventually I got the form to submit, though these hurdles made the initial experience less than smooth.
3. I get a confirmation that the email will be sent and I’m done. That’s literally all it took! I’m also back at the main form again so I could quickly fire off more emails to be sent in the future.
Ok, so this review is a bit short, but seriously the service was that simple. I can see how this could be used for a GTD (Getting Things Done) mentality of managing all of your items and setting yourself up for reminders. Many people live and die by their email and I’m one of them. I would definitely like to see them possibly expand this to offer text message support and maybe fix the few hurdles with regards to time zones and spam filtering, but all in all I think this is a simple, clean service that doesn’t require 200 new features and a blog. It does what it says and it works.
