Boomerang for Gmail: Now bringing Magic to everyone’s inbox

Back when we first talked about Boomerang for Gmail, we were amazingly impressed. Today, it’s still our absolute must-have plugin for Gmail. The ability to send and receive email exactly when you want is incredible. However, nothing is perfect, and Boomerang was no exception. The team from Baydin Software had to go back to the drawing board to make a great thing better.

The were amazingly successful.

The new features? Here’s a list:

• Completely new UI
• Priority Inbox support
• Magic

We’ll talk about Magic in a bit, and yes, that’s actually the name of the feature. However, the new UI and Priority Inbox support are amazing. I love that the UI is completely clean now, almost looking native to Gmail as a feature instead of a plugin. My complaint to the Baydin team before was that when I scheduled a message with Boomerang, it would drop me back to my inbox, instead of to Priority Inbox. That problem has now been fixed, as well.

What’s more? For an awesome integration with Priority Inbox, you now have more choices about how a message is returned. As you can see here to the left (and this is how I label my Boomerangs), you can choose to have a message returned as starred. Doing this puts it neatly into your Important section of Priority Inbox.

So now, let’s talk a bit about Magic. Back a few months ago, Aye Moah from Baydin told me that I’d be impressed. She was right.

Magic is the newest, biggest feature of Boomerang for Gmail. The idea is that it uses contextual search of your email to find out when the email will be important to you again. Now, instead of having to manually schedule a message (which is still incredibly easy, mind you), Boomerang will often times find the appropriate timing for a message to return to you. If the timing is right, all you have to do is click the message displayed and the email is out of your sight until it’s time to return:

So, is it the best option for sending and receiving email when you want? From what we see, that answer is an enthusiastic yes. While there are other options out there, Boomerang is the only one that is handled directly from within Gmail, doesn’t require fancy formatting and there’s no need to create any additional accounts since it uses Gmail OAuth API.

Boomerang for Gmail is now in an open beta, so there won’t be any scrambling for invitations this time around. The last time, people went crazy for it. If you’ve not given it a try yet, it’s high time that you do. Head over to the Boomerang for Gmail site, snag the Firefox or Chrome extension of your choice and let us know your thoughts.