AwayFind Makes Your Email Management Even More Productive with New Features

We’ve mentioned AwayFind here before at Lifehack, which is one of the best tools you can use to “lifehack” your email. Today the service amped up its lifehacking skills with the arrival of AwayFind Recommendations — and they’ve also unveiled a way for you have the best of the service…for free.

For those of you unfamiliar with AwayFind, here’s what the service does for you and your ever-expanding email inbox:

AwayFind is a web application that finds and delivers timely email messages. When a timely message arrives in your inbox, AwayFind will send an SMS, “push” notify you on your iPhone/Android, or even call, IM, or DM (Twitter). You can also use AwayFind to route messages to your co-workers.

With the latest addition to the AwayFind service, users have a recommendation engine in their toolbox that bases priorities on both history and current response rate. Essentially, you can filter through all of your emails and discover who matters to you most — and you can do it right away.

Why is this so critical to productivity and email management? Considering that the most frequent people you correspond with amounts to less than 2% of the emails you receive, it’s counter-productive to have that small percentage keep you on “inbox alert” all day long. AwayFind Recommendations frees you even further from your inbox with just one click.

In the image below, you’ll see that an “Add” button appears next to those who you commonly receive emails from. Just click on that button and you’ll get an alert via text or our app when that person emails you. Because AwayFind is able to tell you just how frequent — and how recent — these people have emailed you. Figuring who to pay attention to immediately has never been easier.

Additionally, at any point you can change your list with AwayFind’s iPhone & Android apps or Chrome/Firefox & Google Apps extensions. The recommendation engine will also send you updated recommendations when those who are important to you has changed, generally every few weeks or months.

Secondly, AwayFind has now implemented a feature that lets you level up the service even if you’re not at a point where you can upgrade to one of their premium plans.

Now when you invite your important contacts (like those recommended through AwayFind Recommendations, for example) and if they sign up for AwayFind you receive instant, unlimited alerts between each other. Even better, when they sign up, your contacts get unlimited alerts from you as well, allowing you to help them become more productive with their email. It’s a real win-win.

AwayFind has helped numerous people get through their day without being tied to their email — in fact, I’m one of them. Being able to get an important email from my wife or from a client without having to sift through my inbox or check email more than twice per day has been something that has not only improved my productivity, but has helped me get the important work done. With these latest features, AwayFind gives you even more reasons to give the service a try to see if it can do the same for you.

AwayFind has powered up my productivity well beyond the inbox. Why not let it do the same for you?

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Web App Review: AwayFind Helps You Stay Out Of Your Inbox

Your email inbox is killing you.

Well, maybe that is a little extreme, but the peeps over at AwayFind think that living in your inbox isn’t the greatest thing in the world. So, to rid you of obsessively checking your inbox 20 times or more a day they decided to develop a new service for alerting you of important messages and helping you stay out of your inbox all day long.

The idea behind AwayFind’s service is to keep you out of your email inbox by having their service send you urgent messages and things that are worth knowing about. The service will scan your inbox and depending on what filters you have set up on the site and which notification services you have enabled, AwayFind will notify you of messages that you deem important.

AwayFind also offers a way to auto-respond to email as well as giving emailers a way to contact you via a customized web form. The service also can notify you in a ton of different ways including SMS, phone call (not for the free account), email (kind of redundant, huh?), Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Google Talk, even native iPhone push notifications (Android coming soon).

These kind of services always seem cool at first blush, but once you start setting it up and using it, there tends to be something missing. Let’s see what AwayFind has to offer for users.

With all the crazy promises and unique features of the AwayFind service you may be surprised to know that it is super easy to set up. I always dread having to sign up for a trial of a new web app, mostly because they force information out of you that you don’t want to give. Not the case at all with AwayFind; I quickly set up my account by using my Google login and I was guided through the process of setting up which way I want to be notified of something important in my email inbox.

I setup straight SMS messages by supplying my cell number and the system sent me a verification code to enter. After the initial notification and email address setup you can then setup the filters that you want the site to apply to all of your incoming email messages.

Two filters are already setup for you as examples. The first is an alert that sends you a message when a contact that is included in a calendar appointment within the next 12 hours emails you. The second is an email with ‘urgent’ or ‘asap’ flags. You can then setup new filters based on a contacts name, who the email is to, what the subject is, etc. You can then set up a notification to come to you between certain times on the weekdays and weekends.

After setting up some filters you get the chance to take a look at the other great features of AwayFind like the iPhone app that sends push notifications, intelligent auto-responders and email signatures, a customized contact form that can be used for contacts to send you alerts, etc.

I have to say that AwayFind has done a damn good job of making a complicated thing easy to set up. Even with my technical ability, I sometimes find that these kind of services are complicated and confusing. AwayFind has made the process easy for users of all walks.

If you are a feature hungry person and want all kinds of ways to control your incoming email, AwayFind has got you covered. The account that I tried was the free account and found that even for a “limited” version of the service, there were more features than I would possibly find myself using. Here are some of the features:

AwayFind includes ways to setup intelligent filters for scanning your email and notifying you of itiPhone client for push notifications (with Android coming soon)Gmail and Outlook plugins so you can setup and edit filters without signing into the siteCustom contact form for people to fill out to contact youA handy guide on how not to check your email

Also, AwayFind offers several plans that have different amounts of features for users. There is a free version, a Monthly Starter for $15/mo, and a Yearly Pro option for $139/yr. The free plan of course includes a limited amount of features and smaller caps for alerts while the paid versions up the caps and features. You can check out the details of each plan at AwayFind’s plan overview site.

I found that after setting up AwayFind with a few filters that included friends that email me once or twice a week that the service was reliable and decently fast. I did sometimes notice that I would receive SMS alerts in the opposite order that I actually received the email messages, but in my opinion this is a non-issue.

I then set up several different accounts that AwayFind could send alerts to me including my GTalk account, Twitter, and AIM accounts. I found that setting up the GTalk account took a couple of tries, but everything else was fluid and easy to set up. When receiving messages that matched the filter criteria that I outlined all my accounts alerted me in harmony. It sort of reminded me of The Office’s Ryan and his new web service “WUPHF!”. (Pronounced “Woof!”)

I have to admit that I genuinely like what AwayFind is doing here. I think that having the ability to receive “priority” messages via SMS and other outlets is a good way to stay away from checking your inbox every 5 seconds. But, I do think that there is a small audience for this service.

I get a lot of email, but I find that just checking my email 2 to 3 times a day is enough for me to stay on top of things. My contacts know if there is an emergency to call or SMS me. But, if you are receiving hundreds of emails every day and are having a difficult time sifting through the endless garbage that you receive, spending some time with AwayFind’s filters may just be the way to finally take control of your email.

At the very least, sign up for the starter account to see if this service could work for you; it is definitely worth looking at if you are obsessively checking your inbox.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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