Monday, August 29, 2011

3mindme is shutting down! Old owner recommends NudgeMail

Today I received the quoted e-mail below from David Barrett (@quinthar). His work as CEO of Expensify and some complications with maintaining the longevity of 3mindme have made him decide to shut down the 3mindme service effective immediately. He recommends the very similar but commercially operated service NudgeMail as a substitute. You can find other substitution options at an old post of mine discussing these services.
Hi! I'm David, the guy who made 3mindme. I'm very sad to inform you that I'm shutting down the service permanently, starting immediately. I strongly encourage you to check out a similar service at http://nudgemail.com -- it's essentially the same thing as 3mindme, but better.

Q: What will happen to the emails I've scheduled for the future?
A: After I send this email to all users, I'm going to send all future-dated emails immediately. My goal has always been to return every email at precisely the right time. Unfortunately, I'll need to make due with simply returning them at all.

Q: Can I do anything to convince you to keep 3mindme alive?
A: Probably not. It's been a fun service to operate these many years, but as CEO of Expensify (https://expensify.com - Expense reports that don't suck!) I just don't have the time to devote to 3mindme.

Q: Why now, after years of continuous operation?
A: Spam. I recently learned that many users (myself included) were having their emails silently dropped, meaning they got no error response, but the message was never scheduled for future delivery. Solving this problem is very difficult and time consuming, and I'd rather shut down 3mindme than leave it in a non-functioning state.

I think that's all. If you have any questions, feel free to respond to this email and I'll do what I can to help. Otherwise, give NudgeMail a shot, and keep Expensify in mind for your next expense report!

-david
Follow me at http://twitter.com/quinthar
So that is very sad. 3mindme was a nice server-side mail-me-back reminder service that didn't have the ugly commercial taste of pretty much every other alternative.

So bye-bye 3mindme; we'll miss you.

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