Boomerang for Gmail - Review 2022

Boomerang makes Gmail do a few things y'all wish it could practise on its own. The namesake characteristic sends an email back to y'all if your recipient hasn't replied or opened your email by a time that you fix. In a nutshell, Boomerang adds features to Gmail, many of them of great value to people who send hundreds of emails a week. For people who receive hundreds or thousands of emails a week, it'due south not near as useful as Editors' Choice SaneBox. Still, Boomerang has its identify amongst productivity apps.

While this review looks specifically at Boomerang for Gmail, there is a like production for Outlook and Office 365 from the same company.

Pricing and Plans

Boomerang for Gmail offers four tiers of service: Bones (free), Personal ($4.99 per calendar month), Pro ($14.99 per calendar month), and Premium ($49.99 per month). Teams get a discount for Pro and Premium accounts. For Pro, groups of three or more pay $30 per month, plus $x per additional person per month up to 10 people. A group of half dozen, for example, would pay $60 per month. The per-person rate goes down the more people y'all have on your team. For Premium, groups of iii pay $120 per month, plus an additional $40 per person thereafter, again with more discounts for groups larger than 10. A squad of v, therefore, would pay $200 per calendar month.

With whatever of the paid plans, you get a free 30-mean solar day trial with no credit menu required. If y'all choose not to purchase the service after that, you are automatically downgraded to the gratis Bones account.

Basic free accounts work with both Gmail and G Suite (formerly called Google Apps, normally used for business) addresses. With a free business relationship, you get 10 message credits per month. One message credit lets you employ Boomerang on 1 outgoing message. With paid plans, you don't have to worry about credits and limits because there are none.

Basic accounts likewise come with the following features: send later, Boomerang reminders, response tracking, read receipts, click tracking, and Respondable, which shows a gauge indicating whether you're using strong linguistic communication choices to write an email that someone would read and reply to. I'll explain in more detail what all those features do below. The Basic business relationship does not include Boomerang mobile apps, the power to attach notes to emails or create recurring letters, bogus intelligence practical to the Respondable feature, and a few other extras that yous find in higher levels of service.

Next is the Personal account, which merely works with Gmail, not G Suite addresses. Information technology includes everything in Basic, but with unlimited bulletin credits, plus support for mobile apps and the ability to add notes.

Pro accounts piece of work with both Gmail and Thousand Suite addresses. This tier of service includes everything that comes with the Personal account, likewise equally AI in the Respondable feature, and power to fix up recurring messages. You don't go much more at this level, consider how much more expensive it is compared with the Personal business relationship. The merely big deviation is the ability to utilize it with business organisation G Suite accounts.

Finally, the Premium tier of service, which is quite expensive, has everything the Pro business relationship has, plus Rails by Default (which lets you set up custom tracking rules that apply to every email you lot send), a Toolbox feature that lets yous further customize the Boomerang experience, premium back up, and the ability to integrate with Salesforce or another CRM organization.

It'due south hard to gauge Boomerang's value by comparing its price to that of other email assistant services considering they all offer something totally different. SaneBox, for instance, charges more than than Boomerang for its lowest level of service ($7 per month for SaneBox Snack), but less for higher tiers of service ($12 per calendar month and $36 per calendar month for Luncheon and Dinner, respectively).

ActiveInbox, which turns your Gmail inbox into a to-exercise list, costs about the same as Boomerang Personal: $49.92 annually for one person, which works out to be just $4.16 per month.

Nudgemail is some other plug-in assistant for email, and information technology costs between $v per month and $20 per month, depending on the account type and features you cull. Nudgemail may exist the closest to Boomerang in terms of what the ii take to offer, and for my money, Boomerang is better.

Setup and Security

Boomerang requires a browser extension, which you can become for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. You authenticate Boomerang to access your Gmail business relationship using Google's official OpenID/OAuth systems. That means Boomerang does not have your Gmail password. In Boomerang's Privacy Policy, the company says it does non shop whatsoever message text, simply email header information, which includes the bailiwick line, sender, and date. I asked a representative of the visitor for more details.

My contact explained that the date header is used to disambiguate multiple scheduled messages in the aforementioned thread. The Subject, To, From, CC, and BCC headers are used to display information about scheduled letters, in email notifications, and to brandish read receipt data. The size of the message in bytes is also used to ensure that the message is compliant with platform rate limits. All data is stored in an encrypted format. Furthermore, Boomerang does non store any header information for messages that you practice not utilize Boomerang features to. When asked how long the visitor stores the data, I was told that the information may persist in backups for an indefinite amount of time. Enterprise customers can cull to store the Bailiwick, To, From, CC, and BCC headers in a ane-way-hashed format.

When you install Boomerang, your Gmail won't look any different at get-go. Compose a message, however, and you see a few new options at the very bottom of the window. In one case you start using Boomerang features to send emails, you'll also observe the service creates new Gmail labels called Boomerang Outbox and Boomerang Returned.

What Does Boomerang Do?

To become a real sense of what Boomerang adds to Gmail, it helps to wait at its features one past one. As mentioned, the namesake Boomerang Reminders feature boomerangs a message dorsum to you when you send an email and don't become a answer by a date and fourth dimension you set up. In fact, you can customize a reminder even further. Instead of waiting for a reply, you can accept Boomerang remind you about the message if the recipient never opens information technology past a certain time or doesn't click on it. You can also set up Boomerang to send y'all a reminder virtually a sent message regardless of how the recipient interacts with it.

Afterwards an electronic mail is sent and is being tracked, y'all can discover a copy of it with status updates, such every bit how many times the person opened information technology and clicked on content in the email, in a new Gmail characterization called Boomerang-Returned. Those stats update roughly every 10 minutes.

While Boomerang offers read receipts, the email recipient is alerted to them and tin can plow them off, which is good for reasons related to privacy and transparency. More commonly e-mail tracking uses what's called click-and-open tracking, and usually it'south done in secret. If you're the recipient, you don't know that the sender can run across when y'all opened the email, how many times you opened the e-mail, whether you clicked on whatever links in information technology, and and so forth. At least with read receipts the recipients can opt out.

Transport Later is another key characteristic in Boomerang. Information technology lets you schedule emails to send at a engagement and time you set. Recurring Message are similar, but they send repeatedly on schedule. For example, if you send out a reminder every Fri telling people in your function to launder their mugs and remove former food from the communal fridge, you tin write information technology once and schedule it to send every Fri at four p.m. Outlook already has this capability built into it, but Gmail does not.

I like the ability to attach notes to a message you schedule to send using Boomerang, as you tin can add more context and data that only you will encounter about the purpose of the communication.

Respondable guides y'all toward using different language in emails that you write to make them more palatable to the reader. Respondable analyzes your give-and-take choices and the length of the email and subject line while showing you a few rating scales off to the side. When yous edit your email, those scales adjust to reflect your changes. Respondable looks at give-and-take count, subject line length, and the ratio of questions to statements. With Respondable'south advanced AI features (which are for paying customers only) you also see ratings for positivity, politeness, and subjectivity. An email that closes with a question most getting together over coffee on a specific time and date, for instance, will exist rated higher than i that ends, "Please advise."

Boomerang in Use

Using Boomerang, there were times when I felt like it would have been better named Ping-Pong. Ship an email. Receive confirmation that the recipient did or didn't open up it. Look in the Updates tab of Gmail for Boomerang message that accidentally got shuffled at that place. Check the Boomerang-Returned label in Gmail for updates on letters that were sent.

It takes a while to get used to the return mails, where they go and how often they update. I don't like them at all, just then again, I don't transport hundreds of emails a week. In fact, my whole strategy for reducing the demands of email on my life is to but use it less. (I know it doesn't work for everyone, merely it works for me!) Getting more messages seems counterintuitive to "solving the problems of email." I feel similarly well-nigh Nudgemail, an app that'southward pretty similar to Boomerang. I'd rather sentry for updates about the status of sent letters from a totally carve up app. Give me an email marketing and tracking awarding over Boomerang any twenty-four hours.

Of course, a total-fledged email marketing tool isn't for everyone, and it doesn't meet the needs of people in small-scale or micro businesses who chase their work through e-mail but don't necessarily run email campaigns. Promoters, agents, very modest public relations agencies—plenty of people benefit from having a much more localized way to track email responses, or lack of responses.

Information technology's worth noting that SaneBox has some of the aforementioned features and functionality as Boomerang. SaneNoReplies, for example, is a binder (or label in Gmail) that SaneBox creates where information technology keeps track of emails you transport that have not received a answer. I much adopt this choice of keeping the emails in a dissever space rather than having them reappear in my inbox.

What SaneBox brings that Boomerang does not is an automatic filtering of all incoming messages. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of how it works, SaneBox essentially learns which emails are important and which ones likely are not, and it sweeps to a different binder or characterization all the unimportant ones. You withal get those messages, but they aren't clogging upward your inbox.

SaneBox has an excellent tool called SaneLater, which snoozes email. By "snoozes," I mean it hides letters from the inbox and puts them back later. That mode, you can still get important messages in your inbox, but yous can temporarily keep them out of sight when they might be distracting. Boomerang merely recently added a very similar feature. It used to be a dissever production called Inbox Intermission, but information technology was just added to Boomerang. The Pause option temporarily hides all incoming email messages until a time y'all set. It likewise has handy options so that you lot can create exceptions to the dominion and ship an automatic response to people explaining the your inbox is paused until, say, you return from holiday, a leave of absence, or merely the weekend.

A Niche Service

Boomerang adds new tools to Gmail that solve the problem of scheduling emails to send after and tracking emails after you send them. It's a little confusing at first and takes some time to get used to, especially because the finish result is that you have more than email, not less. Information technology's a fine tool if it does what you demand, only I would propose looking at all the bachelor features in SaneBox before committing to Boomerang. The two tools share some overlap, simply SaneBox simply fixes your inbox in ways yous didn't even know information technology needed fixing.

Boomerang solves a very specific problem in a slightly clunky mode. SaneBox makes email better for anybody who is struggling with e-mail in some chapters. For that reason, SaneBox is the Editors' Choice among email assistance tools. But Boomerang is a perfectly fine pick if it does what you need.