1. Just mark the check box of any message you would like to schedule for return,

2. Click the “Boomerang” button,

3. Select a time or enter a custom time and click “Confirm”.

It’s that easy! Note that you will need to be using Gmail’s new look to see the Bulk Boomerang options. You may also have to reload your Gmail page to ensure that you have the latest version of Boomerang installed.  If you want to reschedule any of the messages, just go to the “Manage scheduled messages” page from the Boomerang menu.

That’s cool, you say, but you can’t really see yourself using it? Below are a few examples of how we are using Bulk Boomerang, but we bet you can think of a few too…

• Avoid the morning rush. – Everyone who is anyone knows that the best time to send an email is between 7 and 10 am, so use Bulk Boomerang first thing when you arrive at the office to select all of the email you know can wait and have it Boomerang back sometime later in your day, when its convenient for you.
• Meeting prep 101. – Have an important meeting or project coming up and want to be sure and to be prepared? Select all of the relevant emails and have them return before the meeting in question. That way you can brush up on all the facts and wow your boss or potential client.
• Daily Deals. – I love reading these emails, but honestly, who has time during work? Select them all to return at once later in the day, say during your 3pm coffee break or just before happy hour, then shop and save to your heart’s content without losing precious work hours running up your credit card bills.

We hope you love Bulk Boomerang as much as we do and remember; Life’s a mess, your email shouldn’t be!

Check out these screen shots of Bulk Boomerang in action:

After spending the first 20 some odd years in Kansas, I decided to move to the East Coast, where I live in Washington, DC for over 8 years. In DC, I attended the Catholic University of America and studied philosophy. While I was in school, I also worked a variety of restaurants in the city. Serving, tending bar, and managing (at one restaurant, I did all three); I did just about everything! I fell in love with the city, culture, food, and wine. So, what brings me out West you ask? Well, back in 2008 with the raucous Presidential Election going on, there was this new start up called AirBedandBreakfast.com making splashes in the Tech World. I became an early adopter of the service and eventually an remote employee, which led to multiple trips to the Bay Area and the dream of one day moving to SF.

This past summer that dream came true. After leaving DC and bouncing around North and South America for a few months with just a backpack full of clothes, I made the move to San Francisco permanent. At Airbnb, I found a new career in the tech space.Even though I still love the restaurant biz (hopefully, opening my own someday), I knew this is what I wanted to do. To build on my previous experience I’m taking a couple of programming classes, as well as the online course at CodeAcademy.com. So, far I’m really enjoying to program.

So, what about Baydin, you ask? Well, a few months ago a friend told me about the thing called Boomerang for Gmail, I was intrigued and decided to check it out. Then earlier this month, Baydin posted an ad out for a Customer Service Rep, which I jumped at. I applied and here I am! All of my jobs, whether running a concession stand, working as a store clerk, waiting tables, or working for a startup, have been customer focused. And here at Baydin, user support is my number one priority. I’m here to help make your lives easier. So, no matter the question, large or small, send it my way and I’ll be happy to help. After all, you have a life to get back to and you shouldn’t need to stay buried under that pile of email!

Today, we’d like to officially welcome Safari to the Boomerang family!

If you have been holding out on installing Boomerang because you can’t give up Safari, wait no longer! Here are installation instructions for Safari-goers.

1. Click this red button to download the extension on Safari.

2.Open the downloaded extension file B4G_Safari.safariextz (it should be in your downloads folder), and dobule-click it to install.

3. Click “Install” when Safari asks for confirmation. The confirmation pop up looks like this.

4. Open Gmail in a new tab or refresh the current Gmail tab if you already have it open.

5. Ta-da! You should have Boomerang installed inside Gmail. To confirm you have installed it perfectly, look to the top right of Gmail and to the left of your email address, you should see a Boomerang menu. And if you want to learn how to use all the advanced Boomerang features, check out our demo video.

Let us know if you have any trouble installing this by sending an email to support at baydin dot com. Welcome to the party, Safari!

Alex with Gingerbread Christmas Tree Cookie

If you kept a close eye on our Twitter accounts during the holidays, you may have wondered how we were managing to respond to customer emails while we should have been opening presents. Of course, we were using Boomerang to write the messages before, but have them go out later.

Since we know our users are a creative bunch, we wanted to know how they used Boomerang during the holidays to make their hectic lives easier. So we held a contest to give away some gorgeous Boomerang T-shirts.  We got many tweets with varying degrees of cleverness, usefulness and hilarity. Thank you to everyone who tweeted a suggestion, and here are the 5 winners, picked by our team.

Winners of The Boomerang for Holidays T-shirt Contest

@baydin I am setting reminders for next year’s holidays based on this year’s lessons! #boomerang4holidays

— mblogler (@mblogler) December 23, 2011

Boomerang helped me this holiday season by automagically emailing invoices while i was on vacation #boomerang4holidays boomeranggmail.com
— Brian Lyman (@valestudios) January 5, 2012

Watched all my important emails from the holidays greet me throughout first day at work #boomerang4holiday
— Raoul N. (@rananava) January 5, 2012

Wanna know how productive my holidays were? Sent emails early morning w/o waking up before noon! boomeranggmail.com #boomerang4holidays
— Arturo Cárdenas (@arturocm) January 5, 2012

I used Boomerang to email Santa @ midnight Xmas eve, telling him coordinates to my chimney w/ brownies waiting on roof! #boomerang4holiday
— HERBIVORE PUBLICITY (@Herbivorepr) January 5, 2012

Congratulations, winners! Please email us at boomerang+tshirt at baydin.com with your choice of T-shirt size and color, along with a mailing address. For colors, we have bright blue and dark grey. Sizes range from XS to XL (for size reference, these are American Apparel t-shirts).

Since there are more than 5 that we really liked, we decided to award 3 extra runner-up prizes as well. Each of them will be getting a spin of our Wheel o’ Prizes.

Boomerang for Holidays Runner-up prize winners

Boomerang sent my pre-written email to remind Santa about my Christmas presents at 3am on 25th! #boomerang4holidays boomeranggmail.com

— lcdvirgo (@lcdvirgo) January 5, 2012

Boomerang helped me really enjoy my vacay because I knew EXACTLY who I needed to contact once I was back at the office! #boomerang4holidays

— Stephania Andrade (@OstephaniaO) January 5, 2012

Hey @baydin check out my post about boomerang for SEO’s bit.ly/w8daX5 Please give me a t-shirt IM COLD! #boomerang4holidays

— Nico Miceli (@NicoMiceli) January 5, 2012

If you are a runner-up prize winner, please email us at boomerang at baydin.com  to claim your link to spin the Wheel o’ Prizes.

This was a lot of fun and we really appreciate everyone who participated!

Sometimes finding an email you need is like finding the matches. You see that box of matches all the time around the house when you don’t need it, but when the electricity goes out, it’s nowhere to be found. Emails have a way of doing the same. When you don’t need a message, you can’t avoid seeing it in your inbox. But it will magically hide from you when you go looking for it.

Everyone has his own personal technique to find messages that he’s looking for. Some start with folders and labels. Some go straight to sorting messages and scanning individual folders and messages. Some use the search box first but fall back to sorting and scanning when the search doesn’t turn up what they’re looking for. All these individual techniques have been ingrained because people can’t trust that the email client’s search functionality will locate the messages they need.  Worry no more – we have some good news for you.

Email clients have gotten a lot smarter over the last 10 years, especially their search features. Thanks to the power of search, locating emails is easier than ever. With the right search terms, you should be able to find the specific email that you’re looking for in 5 seconds or less. Today, we’ll show you how to search effectively, and we hope that over time, you will start to trust the search functionality completely.

Here are some of the more useful basic search keywords:

• from: - Search messages from a specific sender name or email address.
• has:attachment - Search for messages that have files attached to them
• label: - Search for messages within a certain label, using hyphens between words for multi-word labels (Gmail only)
• before: - Search for messages sent before a date
• filename: - Search for file names of attachments or file name extensions (i.e. jpg or doc)

Since the exact commands differ from client to client, we made a couple of handy cheat sheets for Gmail and Outlook.  Go ahead and download the cheat sheet for your email client, print it out, and keep it on your desk for the next week.

All printed? Great – practice searching the following :

• Find a message that your coworker sent last week with an important attachment.  “from:joe has:attachment”.
• Find all messages that arrived before 2010.  “beforedate:2010″. .
• Find all messages from your boss, or your mom.  Try “from:boss OR from:mom”

Need even more power? You can easily try more advanced searches (and find other search parameters) by using your client’s query builder. In Gmail (new look), click the downward arrow next to the search button.

A similar advanced search feature exists in Outlook. The exact location differs depending on which version of Outlook you are using, but you should see it either as a dropdown or a tab while typing into the search box, as shown below.

I searched, but it’s still not there!

The default search in email clients often ignore messages in the Trash and Spam folders. In Gmail, remember to use the command “in:anywhere” to include Trash and Spam. In Outlook, access Search Options and check the setting that says “include messages from the Deleted Items folder”.

Introducing Revive Your Inbox

Did you find this post helpful? This is the content from Day 3 of our new 21-day Revive Your Inbox program.  The program provides step-by-step instructions and tips to make conquering email overload easy. You can join the program (it’s completely free) at http://reviveyourinbox.com and start the new year with a shiny inbox.

Even if you’re feeling great about your email, you almost certainly know someone who isn’t. Help them keep their new year’s resolution to conquer email overload by sharing this post here: Tweet

Starting immediately, when you refer a friend to Boomerang and they use the product for the first time, you and your friend both earn a spin of the Wheel o’ Prizes. So every time you recruit a new friend using your referral link, both of you benefit instantly.

When you refer friends to Boomerang, you can help them make email infinitely more satisfying. Now, you’ll also give them a chance to win a Kindle Fire, a stylish T-Boomerang shirt, or any of the other amazing prizes on the wheel:

We hope you (and your friends) enjoy the change. Happy spinning!

Because it is a contextual gadget, a Google Apps domain administrator can now install Boomerang for his or her entire domain. From then on, the Boomerang service will be available for all users instead of only in browsers that have the plugin installed. Installing the contextual gadget is easy; just have your domain adminstrator visit our Google Apps Marketplace page and click “Add It Now.”

It doesn’t support all of the features of the full Boomerang for Gmail plugin, but the Boomerang Contextual Gadget is a great way to introduce Boomerang to your co-workers. Once installed, Boomerang will allow you to set reminders and track responses directly below the emails themselves.

Google Apps Developer Hackathon

We built the Boomerang Contextual Gadget on Google’s own campus in Mountain View, CA as part of the Google Apps Developer Hackathon. It was a last minute decision for us to attend, and we’re really glad that we showed up.

Building on top of Google Apps can be challenging. Fortunately, Google engineers were present and eager to help. Among them were Ryan Boyd and Dan Holevoet, who helped us debug our first manifest file. We discussed the Apps APIs and learned about best practices and what to expect in the future from Google Apps.

We’re glad that people enjoyed the Boomerang Contextual Gadget. In fact, we won first place for Best Integration of Google Apps with an Existing App!

If you’re interested in building a new application with Google Apps APIs, be sure to follow the Google Apps Developer Blog and the Official Apps Developer Twitter feed. If you attend the next event in Mountain View, maybe we’ll see you there!

But we think it’s about time that we return the love. How? The coolest referral program you’ve ever seen. KINDLE FIRES, Kindle Touches, t-shirts, inbox training sessions, beer, money—we’ve got it all.

So here’s the deal:

• For every friend that subscribes to Boomerang, both you and your friend get a free month of service.
• For every friend that installs Boomerang and schedules a message, you get to spin the Wheel o’ Prizes.

Wait, a WHEEL?? WHAT?? Yep, meet the Wheel o’ Prizes.

To get started, just visit the Referral page. From there, you can share Boomerang on social networks and send email invitations to all of your fellow Gmail’ers.  You can also grab your unique referral link to distribute however and wherever you want.

To keep track of which of your friends have followed your advice, check out your personalized Referral page. That’s also where you’ll get to spin the wheel and claim all of your goodies.

The referring is easy, and the stakes are high. Good luck—may the force be with you all. Refer away!

P.S. We’re very proud to announce the very first grand prize winner!  This week we sent a Kindle Touch to Alex Cavoulacos, Founder and COO of The Daily Muse.  She’s been Boomerang’ing for months to help keep her inbox in order. Alex says, “Boomerang is so instrumental to how I manage my inbox, I wrote about it in my magazine for professional women.”

To show you all how it works, we put together this quick overview:

If you haven’t given the new version a test run, what are you waiting for?  Start a session and see what kind of damage you can do.

Don’t forget to let us know what you think of the scheduling system!

We released the first version a few months back, and today we’re excited to release a major update. What’s new? Almost everything. We’ve added the best meeting scheduling system you’ve ever seen—a context aware way to make short work of planning meetings without ever having to leave your inbox. We’ve tucked away the point system and replaced it with real emotional feedback. The Email Game can also now help you make better decisions and offers customizable templates to make common replies a cinch. We’ve also listened to your requests and added the features you needed the most: message threading, attachments, keyboard shortcuts, autocompletion of email addresses, and more. Finally, we retouched the look of our entire UI.

Check out our preview video and some more highlights of our favorite features below, or jump right in and play now.

Smileys – First things first: we tweaked the gaming mechanics based on results from the past year. Smileys are in, points are out.

As you take action on your emails, his expression will change, giving you real emotional feedback, instantly. The more actions you take, the happier he gets. But don’t skip too many messages—he gets pretty sad as well.

For those of you interested in competing with friends or wondering how your session measured up, don’t worry. You can still earn points, and you will be able to see score at the end of the session.

Google Calendar Integration and Smart Scheduling - Scheduling has always wanted to work this way. The Email Game automatically detects dates within messages and adds them to your Google Calendar with the click of a button. You can check if you’re free immediately and reply with a customizable template that’s optimized to make sure everything is communicated properly. Not free at the time they suggested? The Email Game now includes a magical drag-and-drop rescheduling app that makes it incredibly easy for you to suggest alternative times without making mistakes.

Quick Replies - Copy-and-paste no longer. The Email Game now has Quick Replies!

Quick Replies are a set of customizable saved responses that can be inserted into any reply. So instead of rewriting the same responses over and over, build up a set of Quick Replies to cover your bases.

The Quick Reply interface is dead simple. To insert a Quick Reply, just click one of the preset responses or create and save a set of your own.

New Interface Artwork and Icons - Even the look and feel of The Email Game is different. It may not look as exciting as your typical video game, but we think the new design will help you get in and out of your inbox as quickly as possible.

Help Me Decide - Should you reply to that message? Would you rather go hiking or fishing this weekend? We know it’s hard to decide what to do sometimes, and we also happen to know that these decisions waste a ton of time and drain your energy at a frightening clip. To speed things up, we built a decision making platform that gives you a default choice. There’s nothing like having someone else make your tough decisions, right?

We’ve found this tool much more valuable than flipping a coin. If you’re having a hard time making a final decision on something, it sometimes helps to give the Cosmos a voice in the decision—set the chances to be very biased toward your instincts, then when the answer comes up “no” it’s much easier to have finality on the decision. You may also find that having a default choice turns a difficult decision into an easy one, when your gut immediately protests the way the decision came out.

Speed - The nuts and bolts have all been tightened. It’s faster than ever.

Threading - Conversations in The Email Game are now threaded. We worked really hard to write a better threading algorithm than Gmail’s. The Email Game will break up the conversations that Gmail groups when they’re not really part of the same conversation, and will group the ones that are.

Google Contact Integration - The new version is fully integrated with Google Contacts and autofills the address fields as you type. If you’ve ever struggled to remember if it’s frankdatank2222@gmail.com or frankdatank1111@gmail.com, this one’s for you!

Attachments - Attachments aren’t dead yet, unfortunately. Now you can upload files with your emails without having to leave the Email Game.

Keyboard shortcuts - In case you addicted to keyboard shortcuts, you can now use most of the Gmail shortcuts in The Email Game as well. If you want to use these, just make sure they are enabled from the Settings page.

New text editor – The old text editor got it done, but the new one is considerably more slick and responsive.

So…what are you waiting for? Conquer your inbox.