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Ask HN: Do You Email Yourself?
I often do this, since it can be a hassle to retrieve a given piece of information when I am using many different systems during the day. Mostly, my content is solely in the subject line, and is often just a reminder, or personal note to myself.
This got me wondering: Is there a product here, or could email providers do something special when they notice you doing this?
- dartisan 7y agoPersonally, no. I try to keep inbox zero as often as I can. For persisted reminders, I lean on other tracking software (which is usually just Notes, my phone alarm, or my calendar).
- devicetray0 7y agoYes, all the time. Almost daily
- tkifnn 7y agoI email myself from work very frequently
- sethammons 7y agoAny note while I'm out and about is emailed to myself.
- xq3000 7y agoHaha, I remember those times when I would do that to save cool links for later. Good times. :) Then, they made Pocket [1]. The real question is what comes after Pocket? [1] https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/
- agsilvio 7y agojumproot.com Shameless plug.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI used to use a pocket notebook which I still carry, to write myself to-do items. Now I just send myself a quick email with the to-do item as the subject.
- masonic 7y agoI use Dropbox text files or just save as email drafts when the same email is accessible on both devices.
- sedeki 7y agoDelayed/scheduled email to self is a thing, to answer your product question. Guess mainly for the non-tech crowd.
- ian0 7y agoYes, every day. A few years ago someone taught me how to structure gmail using a system of multiple inboxes and stars. So when an email comes in I assign it a star and archive, it then shows in its inbox. Whenever I have a task that I want to remember for later I email it to myself and assign it just like I would a normal mail. Its a phenomenal system. I dont need another app, can email myself from anywhere. Can get people to email me tasks etc.
- appleflaxen 7y agocan you elaborate or provide a reference?
- ian0 7y agoSure thing: 1) Login to settings and enable multiple inboxes. This is my setup: has:red-star URGENT has:orange-star Important has:blue-info Pending on someone else has:purple-question For reference Panel position: Below the inbox 2) Still in the settings, enable stars in the order above. 3) When you check your mail, send off instant replies, archive or star the rest accordingly. To get the orange star you just click the star icon twice, three times for the blue one etc. The purple ones I use to store things like documents I may reference later etc. In practice, I focus on the red stars every day and try to work through the orange ones maybe once a week. You could proberbly do without the blue, but its handy when your in a project management like role. You can run through them once a week and ping people for updates.
- enhdless 7y agoSimilarly, sometimes I message myself on Slack or Facebook.
- scubbo 7y ago> message myself on [...]Facebook. I didn't even know that was possible!
- wingerlang 7y agoProbably thousands of emails to myself. I had some email tool and the top from/to was myself.
- ruvis 7y agoI stopped doing that when I got todoist. Less clutter.
- mikorym 7y agoNo, but here is a way to WhatsApp yourself. Create a group with one other member. Delete that member. Now you can send messages (or media) to yourself and only you will receive it. It's useful for storing notes or pictures or whatever...
- alireza94 7y agoI haven’t mailed myself in over 3 years. I mostly try to rely on Things for reminders and tasks.
- RaceWon 7y agoOf course not... that's the craziest thing I ever heard. I text myself.
- bharani_m 7y agoYes. I email myself almost everyday. I've even made a browser extension for it - https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me
- sloaken 7y agoOf course I do, because I am the only one who knows whats important. I then filter the email into a folder. What excitement when I look into the folder and say 'Oh crap I forgot I need to do ...' but glad I now remember.
- baccredited 7y agoThere is a product here, and I'm a happy customer: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captio-email-yourself-with-1-tap/id370899391 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captio-email-yourself-with-1-t... I use it daily.
- mike-cardwell 7y agoI created a Matrix room on my Matrix server with just myself in it. I post notes to it of things I need to remember.
- dyeje 7y agoAll the time. I use my email as a TODO list, so I send myself items. Not aware of any products that enhance it, nor can I think of anything I'd want like that.
- d--b 7y agoYep. I don't really need something special to handle this, though. I do it specifically because I don't want to have something else.
- ezekg 7y agoI text myself.
- cm2012 7y agoYes
- 0_gravitas 7y agoso, i do the thing you really arent supposed to do, i have a private github repo where i throw all files that i want synched, from notes to full textbooks. i used to email myself, but it was always very annoying to do (and then i would need to email back any changes i would make), so github winds up being a reasonable solution- ive tried dropbox but i prefer the control i have with git/github
- srijanshetty 7y agoI loved the combined view of reminders and email that 'Inbox by Gmail' used to provide, in the lack of a more sophisticated solution by GMail, I just email reminders and Snooze them to the appropriate day. This little hack works really well and have given me decent mileage.
- bladewolf47 7y agoSignal labels the conversation as "Note to Self" when you send yourself something
- lovestodonothin 7y agoYes I write letters to my future self once in a while, maybe a year or two into the future. It's really interesting to read what my life was like when I wrote the letter and I'm always curious if things turned out as expected and if I managed to achieve some of my goals. https://www.futureme.org/ https://www.futureme.org/
- imarg 7y agoI email myself sometimes. But most of these emails get lost in the clutter. What would you expect this product (or the email provider) to do for such cases?
- shanecleveland 7y agoConstantly
- Jugurtha 7y agoAmong many lines, I have the following in my .zshrc: alias note='vi +star +'\''normal Go'\'' +'\''r!date +\%F\ \%T'\'' ~/workspace/notes/notes.md +'\''normal Go'\'' +'\''normal Go'\' function nupd() { git -C ~/workspace/notes commit -a -m "Update notes $(whoami)@$(hostname)" git -C ~/workspace/notes push } It allows me to type: note And opens a file, `notes.md`, with vi in insert mode with a timestamp. When I'm done, I type: nupd It commits the changes and pushes them to a repo. When I go to other machines, I just pull. I also used to have a todo alias, but now I switched to TaskWarrior. I made the `.task` directory a git repo and have a function function tupd() { git -C ~/.task commit -a -m "Update tasks $(whoami)@$(hostname)" git -C ~/.task push } Whenever I use TaskWarrior for creation, etc, I run tupd. I wrote hooks before but became frustrated. When I use other machines, I just pull the repo and have my tasks ready. The commit message contains the username and hostname so I know from which machine I did it. I have files like these (knowledge base repo that automatically builds a page https://jhadjar.gitlab.io/kbase/ https://jhadjar.gitlab.io/kbase/ , which reminds me it's been way too long I haven't pushed to it). I also have a file called lessons.md, listing the many times I screwd up (dates, context, why it was a screw up). A function called "learn" does a `bat` (better cat) on that file to review the lessons.
- SamReidHughes 7y agoRarely, for Very Important TODO items.
- kastork 7y agoI forward emails to my OmniFocus mail drop address. It is a fairly effortless way to move actionable email out of the email archive and into something that's built for action tracking. The service is described here: https://kas.d.pr/2e0Vsy https://kas.d.pr/2e0Vsy
- jfoster 7y agoSuppose someone does email themselves. What makes you think that there is a product opportunity in that? They may be in that behaviour pattern because it works well for them.