PSA: Changed Outgoing Text Phone Number

Just wanted to let you all know that the outgoing number for all text messages from SendRecurring is changing to 213-214-0476. For you global users, that is a United States number, so make sure you add a +1 in front of any filters that you had in place for it or in any address book entries.

Let me know if you have any questions! conrad@sendrecurring.com.

8 Ways Recurring Emails Will Make Your Life Easier

SendRecurring is more than just a reminder service – it’s a useful tool that can increase your productivity both at work and in your daily life. Here are eight ways some of SR’s users have used recurring emails and texts to make their lives easier.

  1. Payroll Submission RequestsWhether payday is every friday, every 1st and 15th of the month, or in other increments, sending a reminder to yourself (or your employees) is a great way to make sure everyone submits their hours on time. SendRecurring has custom scheduling options that allow you to send emails whenever you want. 
  2. Rent Reminders to Yourself (or Your Tenants)
    Sometimes the months fly by, and before you know it you’re a day late on rent. Avoid late fees and frustration by sending a monthly reminder a day or two before you need to turn in your rent check. This is also a great tool for landlords who want to send a friendly reminder to tenants. 
  3. Weekly or Monthly Meetings
    Remind your co-workers, classmates, church quorums, PTA, or other groups of weekly or monthly meetings. Include any special instructions so they remember to bring important papers, think of questions in advance and do some brainstorming before the event. 
  4. Notes to Self for Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tasks
    If you’ve got a client or class whose assignments you turn in on a recurring basis, send yourself repeating reminders. This works great for any daily, weekly, or monthly tasks you need to stay on top of. 
  5. Yearly Birthday and Anniversary Messages
    Keep track of friends’ and family members’ birthdays, anniversaries, and other special dates with a yearly reminder. Simply set the email up to send once a year, and you’ll never forget to buy a card again! 
  6. Remind Clients to Pay Invoices
    Sometimes clients get busy and forget to pay for services rendered. Send a professional reminder to clients of unpaid invoices. 
  7. Self-Help like Fitness Reminders, Inspiring Messages
    Stay inspired by reminding yourself to do your daily workout, make healthy meal choices, call a loved one, or keep a happy demeanor. Pick a mantra and send it to yourself every morning or once a week to feel the positive vibes.
  8. Receive More Votes
    Social media contests are all the rage, but it can be annoying to both you and your friends to keep sharing the same link over and over. Instead, set up a recurring email reminding them to vote daily, and include your link in the body of the email.

Take advantage of all the ways recurring emails can help make your life easier! Whether you’re sending reminders to your contacts or to yourself, you can see an increase in productivity.

Start sending reminders with a free SendRecurring account here.

If you’ve got a success story from using SendRecurring, email us to be featured on the blog!

SendRecurring Spring 2016 Feature Updates

We have been hard at work on several new features for SendRecurring in 2016!

Contacts

Contacts have been requested several times. They are in now and make it SIMPLE to include previously used email addresses and phone numbers when creating reminders. Email addresses can either be autocompleted as you type or can be inserted in bulk by clicking on the TO, CC, or BCC buttons and working from contact popup. Contacts can be edited in Settings.

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 2.08.39 PM

End Dates

When SendRecurring first launched reminders were based on Start and End date, this was changed with the move to the on/off system. But the users spoke out! Many of you wanted the old End Date function back and here it is. Just specify an end date and your reminders will be turned off if the next send would schedule for a time later than that date.

Reference Numbers

A lot of users wanted a way to differentiate between reminders that have the same subject, reference numbers/phrases do exactly that! Enter a reference number or phrase in the text box (near the subject box) and the reference number will appear in the manage view, just before the subject.

Filtering

Filtering has been added on the Manage page. Type into the filter box to see your reminders magically vanish/reappear based on what you type. This makes browsing long lists of reminders and finding what you need a SNAP. The following fields are filtered: recipients, subject, reference number, and content.

Plan and Pricing Updates

We have again updated our plans and pricing. The biggest changes are the removal of the Unlimited plan and addition of yearly billing options. The Unlimited plan had to be removed due to several accounts of abuse, and no real benefit as 99% of users were well under unlimited. The Pro 10,000 plan has been created in its place to meet the needs of users, please contact me if you need a plan with more quota than that!

Yearly plans have been implemented but are not advertised just yet. If you want to be billed annually just let me know. There is a discount included for doing this!

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 1.22.05 PM

 

So many of these are user-requested features so hopefully this encourages all users to reach out and suggest things they want in SendRecurring.

Happy Sending!

The #1 Productivity Hack for Procrastinators is …

There are more than six billion people in this world and I am willing to bet that the majority of us are probably procrastinators. It is just an easy habit to fall into. Think of procrastination as if it were like quick sand. It is easy to stumble and sink into and hard to get out of. Not to worry though, here are some tips that can help pull you out of the procrastination pit.

 

1.Set an abundant amount of alarms.

As a procrastinator, you all know the feeling of waiting until about fifteen minutes passed your alarm to actually get up. Set several alarms to force you out of bed and to give you time to transition from morning yawns and sighs to being ready for a new day. Also, make hitting the snooze alarm harder to hit to make you get out of bed with each alarm.

Curated from 15 Productivity Hacks For Procrastinators – Full News

Now I don’t want to outright call myself or SendRecurring users procrastinators, but let’s face it, we all lie somewhere on the procrastination spectrum. This article caught my eye and I was pleasantly surprised by the number one recommendation to be more productive: Set an abundant amount of alarms!

SendRecurring has been created from the ground up to be the best way possible to do just that, whether it is through emails or texts. I recently found a fantastic use-case for SendRecurring that allowed me to be more productive.

I was faced with the problem of uploading my young family’s five plus years worth of videos to the cloud service we had FINALLY decided on using (Amazon Cloud drive btw). The problem is that we have over 70 GB of footage between the two of us for that time period (a lot).

After some math I realized this would take upwards of 100 hours with our connection so I needed to split the upload into many sessions, which I planned to only do during the evenings so our connection was decent during the day. This turned out to be time consuming work because every evening I have to

  1. Remember to do this!
  2. Figure out where I left off
  3. Start the upload

All in all it’s about a 10 minutes of time, so not too bad. However at the end of the evening, after unwinding from work, and watching an episode or two of a good show, it is REALLY tempting to put off anything like this in favor of just… procrastinating.

So to solve this for myself I setup a text message reminder to send to me every 9:30 PM, just about an hour before I actually go to sleep:

textremindervideos

And here is the result.

wp_ss_20150625_0001

Guess what? It worked. 100% satisfied with how SendRecurring performed, and it led me to some crazy actions….

TEXTING IS BACK FOR ALL ACCOUNTS! CHECK IT OUT NOW!

Happy Reminding

NEW Changes to Price Packages

After almost a year of fine tuning and research, we have made some changes to Sendrecurring’s price packages to increase the level of service available to you, our awesome customers.

The former plan options:

Price Package Info Image

Demo (FREE) – 100 emails per month

Basic ($4.99) – 500 emails per month

Pro ($14.99) – 5000 emails per month

 

The new plan options, and an overview:

Price Package Info Updated

 

Trial (FREE) – The Demo account has been redubbed Trial, and is now limited to 100 emails sent. It does not reset at the beginning of each month like the Demo did, which means when you reach 100 emails, you’ll need to upgrade in order to send more emails. Our main reason for this change was to curb spamming, which will benefit everyone and reduce the amount of disgruntled email receivers.

Basic 500 ($9.99) – Basic 500, previously Basic, includes 500 emails per month, as well as open rates, statistics, and customization.

Pro Unlimited ($19.99) – The Pro Unlimited is the best value of all the packages. Previously, users were limited to 5000 emails per month. Now, Pro Unlimited account holders have unlimited emails each month.

 

Recurring Text Message Reminders

You may have noticed that the new package options do not include recurring texts. We have temporarily suspended recurring texts for new users. If you are an existing user and your paid package included text messaging, you’ll still be able to send and edit those texts. But if you’re a new user or need to upgrade your account, texting will not be available.

 

To sign up for a free account or to upgrade your account, view our price options. If you have any questions about the new pricing options or any of the included services, feel free to email any questions to conrad@sendrecurring.com.

Send Reminders Quarterly, Bi-Yearly, Yearly or… whatever!

New Feature

This morning I put the final touches on the latest feature for Sendrecurring: a longer than monthly option! Users can now schedule reminders to send any X number of months. However long you want!

You will see the new box when you go to create or edit any reminder:

monthpattern

This is a great feature that a lot of users have suggested. I really wish I could have implemented it sooner but it is a more difficult thing to code than you would initially think, due to every month having a different number of days and leap years, and that Python does not have an “Increment by Month” function in their datetime library.

For those that are curious I will brain dump a little on how I implemented it.

Technical Stuff Beyond This Point

The original system for monthly reminders was pretty simple and foolproof, I would simply add days to the current date until I was at the date that a reminder should be scheduled. This handled both cases of initial creation of a reminder and rescheduling a current reminder really well.

In the new system I could not do that. Reasons include that a new email will need to be sent this month, not X number of months away, and that a reminder past its send date due for rescheduling should be rescheduled X number of months away.

I added some checks.

1. I check if the current time is after the reminder/emails scheduled time (ie already past). If it is then I automatically start looking at future dates for it to be scheduled.

2. I check if the date of the reminder’s LAST scheduled send is before todays date. Brand new reminders will not have this, so that is an indicator that one is brand new. If today’s date is after the last scheduled send then that means it has been scheduled before and any subsequent schedulings will use the X number of months information.

A snippet of source code below (this is rough and untailored for the blog) but could make some sense if you really need to a solve  similar problem. Just ask me if you want clarification :D.

  if localdatetime > localsendtime:
      localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = 1)
    try: eml = email.localsendtime
    except: eml = None
    if eml and localdatetime > eml:
      #add months depending on monthpattern
      try: monthpattern = email.monthpattern
      except: monthpattern = 1
      #add months if the monthpattern is 2 or higher
      if monthpattern > 1:
        monthdays = (monthpattern)*30
        localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = monthdays)
    #add days until it is the correct date
    while getattr(localsendtime, "day") != email.rpattern:
      localsendtime += datetime.timedelta(days = 1)

A few of you may notice that I use monthpattern * 30 for the “month” increment. This is actually slightly lower than the real days per month average of 30.4. The downside to this is that if someone does a really long monthlypattern, the days could eventually be off. It would need to be off by an entire month for the subsequent datetime.timedelta(days = 1) to no longer “catch”  the desired date so there is some buffer for error.

I will be keeping a watchful eye on what happens with this. Anything over 75 months may be inaccurate, 6.25 years. I wonder if anyone would really want to be reminded about something that far off.

Incoming: Improvements to Sendrecurring

Sendrecurring.com is getting some upgrades!

You may have noticed some minor upgrades over the past weeks such as corrections to wording and description, and better validation on lists of comma separated emails, but BIG changes are on the way.

Around a year ago I posted about how Sendrecurring would do away with logins and instead get by with actions confirmed via email. This led to the currently-in-place system whereby you must click a confirmation link with the creation of each new recurring email. This works, but it has it’s flaws. Chief among them is that it is difficult to manage large numbers of emails as you are constantly bouncing between your inbox and Sendrecurring. Also it can be tedious filling in the same owner email, and timezone information for every email, those things would be better stored long-term… SOOO

Sendrecurring is getting user accounts!

User accounts will begin being rolled out soon. If you read this and would like an account now head on over to the signup page and then proceed to the login page. You will be confronted with a single confirmation email (likely your last one if you make an account) before you can being using it.

What will you find after logging in? A MUCH nicer dashboard for handling all of your emails!

Manage section of sendrecurring

Some improvements to point out:

  1. All of your emails are listed out for easy viewing of everything you have running
  2. Turn Off and Turn On toggles
  3. The Next Send time is clearly visible
  4. It’s just so clean!

And the improvements do not stop there, look at how much simpler the email creation form is for you:

sr_new_email

 

Improvements here include:

  1. No “Owner” email. You are already logged in you don’t need to enter this!
  2. No Start Date and End Date or Duration boxes. What? How? Email starting and stopping will be controlled by the Turn Off and Turn On buttons on the manage page, overall much easier to understand and use than all the date selection boxes! New emails will start out Turned On and you can toggle them to your heart’s content from there.
  3. A much improved time entry box. There’s still a drop down for time selection if you want it, but the new box also allows you to type out times such as: “3:30 am” “15:00” “12 45” and auto-completes a correct time from there.
  4. No limit on specific times. Previously the time dropdown was limited to send only in hourly increments. Well that is gone now. The new type-in time box, coupled with the server improvements allow emails to be sent at any time you want, 5:31 am? Sure. 6:47? Whatever. I expect the majority of emails will still be sent at even or quarterly times, but the option for any time was often requested, so here it is!

These new features will not be replacing the current features… right away. I do plan to phase out the non logged-in email creation with support for updating the emails you do have continuing on for quite some time.

Expect the landing page to have some information about logging in and the new account in the near future.

Also, all this great stuff is still going to be offered for free!

Tell your friends and coworkers!

Thanks,

Conrad Frame

 

~12 Hour Outage Post-Changes

There was a 12-hour outage to the mail system of the site today.

Luckily, I was notified by a few users that their emails were no longer going through and that even the confirmation emails were not being sent, in fact, no emails were being sent. I was able to get a hold of Google (who is hosting Sendrecurring) and get the issue resolved

The issue was due to Sendrecurring switching to the high replication datastore recently. The Appengine service gave Sendrecurring the “default” limit of 100 emails per/day after the switch, to be upped back to the regular limit after the first billing cycle (one week). Well, Sendrecurring hit that 100 limit very quickly before users started noticed the problem. The limit is back up to the normal one now.

Sorry for the gap in service.

Send on

Changes Behind the Scenes

Sendrecurring is moving forward after many months on the back-burner! I am excited to be working on it again.

To kick things off I did some changes behind the scenes, sorry, not much to see from outside appearances. I won’t keep it a secret that I am using Google App Engine as the backend for Sendrecurring. A year ago they offered a new feature called the High Replication Datastore, which is a fancy term describing how an app is spread across Google’s servers, which I had not taken the opportunity to upgrade to. I did that this evening! Hooray for security, server safety, and data redundancy!

Secondly, I cleaned up all of the html template files for that front-end of Sendrecurring. I don’t know what I was thinking 1.5 years ago when I hacked them all together, but they were a disorganized mess. Things are more orderly now, and some sense has been established.

Why am I doing these changes to the backend? Well I am preparing for some big changes to the overall application and would like clean plumbing before diving in too deep.

Changes forthcoming, possible features are….. logins, saved contacts, open-rates on emails, attachments and definitely more fine-tuned recurrence options and delivery.

 

Thanks!