"Boomerang" Alternative
 

Hi all,

Newly converted Fastmail user here. I've always wanted to, and finally made the plunge.

I'm definitely a heavy email user and fire off lots of emails daily.

Overall, I love Fastmail but one feature I relied heavily on in Gmail was 'Boomerang' (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) and/or 'Mailfred' (http://mailfred.de/) - whereby any outgoing emails come back to your inbox automatically after X days with no response (to maintain 'inbox zero').

I've tried to do this manually using my 'outbox' as a follow up folder, but it's becoming unmanageable after a few weeks.

Does anyone have any good advice for how to manage this sort of workflow in Fastmail?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Digging up this thread as I've been trying out Fastmail and have been wondering the same thing. Where are all the more advanced email apps?

Is there anything like Boomerang, Streak, etc. for FastMail? If not, why isn't this a top priority for FastMail to compete with Gmail and Gsuite?

Unfortunately both the popularity and nature of Gmail drives companies to build solutions for that.... They're basically "skating to where the puck is" in that regard.

There's sadly not much FastMail can do about this from their end — it's really up to other companies to build solutions. However, it's also worth keeping in mind that FastMail is an open IMAP system, so any third-party web-based solutions that can do its magic over IMAP will work just as easily with FastMail as it does with Gmail.

In other words, FastMail isn't really stopping anybody from building these kinds of solutions.

Unfortunately, even though some of these third-party app developers are only using IMAP to access Gmail, they've tied themselves in much more closely into the Gmail infrastructure for things like authentication. Again, that comes down to what the companies developing these apps are doing, and it's really their choice if they want to target their offerings exclusively to Gmail and not play nice with other IMAP providers.

"BoomerangGmail" is really a great feature.

If the fastmail crew just get into this feature... It is not a very big working drama.

And could be a game changer for so many users!

Although you can't get features like this built into the web interface — at least not until FastMail either builds it themselves or allows extensibility so that a third-party developer can plug it in — there are alternatives to Boomerang that just use straight IMAP and would therefore work fine with FastMail. Newton comes to mind off the top of my head, although there are others.

In most cases these services are designed to have you use their own apps instead of a web client, but the rules and processes are handled by a cloud service, not the client app itself, so things like "snooze" would still be applied to return things back to your inbox.

At the end of the day, however, this is why I still think Gmail is generally a better e-mail solution for folks who prefer to "live on the web" as opposed to using native clients. I use FastMail specifically because it has such great support for IMAP mail clients.