In almost 15 years, we’ve built a lot of software and built a profitable company, but we’ve never made an acquisition before. This is a big milestone for us, and it’s going to let us bring even more powerful productivity tools to you. We’re incredibly excited about what we’re going to be able to do together, and we’d like to share a little bit of that vision in hopes that you’ll be excited, too. 

Why GQueues? 

Well, 2024 was the year of experiments for us at Boomerang. Instead of mostly building new features like in prior years (there were some new features), we spent most of last year making our existing features work better. We ran a total of 52 experiments across all Boomerang products to optimize onboarding, simplify workflows, and smooth out rough edges. If you started using Boomerang in 2023 or earlier, you may have noticed a lot of small optimizations. (1) They worked! 

Managing all of those experiments was complicated. There were so many cross-functional responsibilities, so many changes affecting different parts of the products at one time, and so much instrumentation and analysis needed to make sure we were measuring the impacts correctly. Although we’re still only a 20-person team, the amount of chaos and communication needed, especially since we’re fully remote, made it feel a lot bigger. This was the first time in our company history where we felt like we outgrew our systems and processes.

We tried using the same project and task management software we’d always used, and we tried new ones. We tried changing our workflows. We changed how we organized meetings. And no matter what we did, we still screwed up the analytics, or forgot about mobile, or used the wrong control group, or ported the wrong logic into the wrong version, or botched the rollout. We were continuously learning about what we could have done better in the next experiment, and we kept getting better, but we never got our processes where we wanted them.

Every single experiment was “the same” in the sense that we had an existing workflow, built a test version of that workflow, and wanted to measure the difference. But every experiment was different too: maybe we couldn’t use the same cohort splitting system, or maybe mobile had to be special-cased, or maybe two experiments would confound each other. 

None of the project management software we looked at were built to work well with “the same, but not the same” even though most of the work we do day to day, even beyond the experiments, actually fits into that category. We thought hard about making our own project management software, but unlike Tiny Speck(2), we didn’t have $15 million laying around. 

So when Cameron, the GQueues founder, reached out a few months ago, we thought “Huzzah! Let’s buy this thing, rebrand, cut costs, and do some synergy!” Oh wait, sorry, we’re not an evil private equity firm. That’s their playbook, not ours.(3) What we actually thought was “What perfect timing! We’ve just been thinking about how to solve the problems GQueues has been solving this whole time.”

In many ways, GQueues felt like a natural extension of Boomerang. GQueues, like us, has been around for 15 years, is bootstrapped, takes care of customer data the way we want our own data taken care of, and cares more about value creation by making our customers’ lives better rather than maximizing revenue growth at all costs. We’ve known Cameron for over a decade, and we know that their team will integrate with ours synergistically (Is this really an acquisition announcement if the word “synergistically” isn’t used?) 

From the beginning, Boomerang has been a productivity software company. We started with email software because email was the tool our customers used to get their work done. We started as a Gmail extension because we wanted to seamlessly integrate into our customers’ existing workflows. And just like us, GQueues has best-in-class integrations with the software you already use to get work done, like Google Drive, Google Calendar and Gmail.

I’m already excited, how do I start? 

GQueues is the leading task management and workflow organization for Gmail users. Its seamless integrations with Google apps like Calendar, Drive, and Gmail are trusted by GQueues users around the world to organize their work and life.

If you love Boomerang, we think you’ll love GQueues, too. Give it a try today!

What is GQueues?

GQueues is a task management and productivity tool that helps individuals and teams organize their tasks and workflows. It’s the best task management app for Gmail users because it integrates seamlessly with Google’s apps like Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Docs.

GQueues helps you focus your energy on what’s most important. You’ll spend less time managing your work, and more time achieving your goals. And its intuitive design promotes transparency in teams, making it easy for everyone to collaborate and stay aligned.

What does this news mean for Boomerang users?

Starting today, Boomerang for Gmail’s Premium plan will now have a GQueues for BUSINESS subscription included at no additional cost!

For now, there are no changes to Boomerang products or features. We will continue to develop and support our category-defining productivity tools for email management and meeting scheduling. In the future, we plan to explore how GQueues can integrate with Boomerang.

At the risk of landing on Our Incredible Journey, we are really, really, earnestly, truly excited at what we’re going to be able to do together. GQueues is already a great project and task management system, but the team has always been small. So if we can combine the existing system with what the Boomerang team learned from punching way above our weight in project management complexity over the last year, we think we can build something truly special. We are full of ideas that we can’t wait to build, get in front of customers, use ourselves, and keep making better!

1. If you haven’t used Boomerang since before 2024, please give it another try! We promise it’s better. We fixed so many things!
2. You probably know them as Slack
3. We might actually rebrand, coming up with names and logos is kinda fun

P.S. For more, check out Cameron’s post over at GQueues about joining Boomerang.

Read receipts

You know read receipts, right? It’s the email tracking software feature in Boomerang that lets you know if someone read your email. 

As we prepared to release our latest update to Boomerang’s read receipts, our team was going back and forth in a debate that remains unresolved among us. We realized that some of us were pronouncing the first word “read” as in the color red, rhymes with bread, while others say “read” like the part of some musical instruments that vibrates, rhyming with knead.

The case for pronouncing it like red

 | ɹɛd |

Proponents of read receipts — pronounced with a short E, rĕd, like bread — stake their case on the tense of the verb.

The software feature functions as a notification of something that already happened, in the past: did they read my email? It is implied that the recipient’s reading of the email would have happened before the present moment in time. Therefore, the first word in the phrase “read receipts” must be the past tense of the verb read. And the past tense of the verb read is pronounced with a short E.

The case for pronouncing it like reed

 | riːd | 

To explain why it should be read receipts instead — pronounced with a long E, rēd, as in need — we consulted teammates whom we noticed saying it that way. Here’s what Jeff, the manager of our support team, had to say:

“Why do I pronounce read receipt correctly instead of “red” receipt?  An interesting question, to be sure (need I also clarify I pronounce ‘sure’ with a silent e – not as surrey?).  When you go to the store and get a receipt – what kind of receipt is it?  A purchased receipt?  No, it is a purchase receipt.  A read receipt tracks reads in the same way a purchase receipt tracks purchases.  If you design a receipt to track shades of crimson, by all means, call it a red receipt.  But that is not what a read receipt tracks, nor how it is pronounced.”

So how do YOU say read receipts?

So, reader, what say you? Which is correct?

Our informal poll of the Boomerang team revealed an approximate 60-40 preference for saying “red” instead of “reed”. Far be it from us to say that one or the other is right or wrong! If you found this page because you were trying to settle a debate, please go ahead and send the link to your opponent to prove you are not wrong.

If you have any particular expertise on this topic and you’d like to weigh in or there’s another perspective on this debate that we have neglected to consider or if you just have a strong opinion, please do not hesitate to let us know by emailing boomerang at baydin dot com.

To track emails you send with read receipts, install Boomerang for Gmail. We also make read receipts for Outlook, which you can use by installing Boomerang for Outlook!

Whether you use Boomerang or not, knowing a few keyboard shortcuts can help you use Outlook more productively. To help you find the most useful keyboard shortcuts quickly, we created an Outlook keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet. Bookmark it, download it, email it, and print it out to keep at your desk!

The most useful Outlook keyboard shortcuts

If you’re just getting started with Outlook or switching from a different email account like Gmail, here are a couple to get you started:

• Ctrl + M: Check for new mail. Outlook may need to be refreshed more frequently than the email account you’re switching from.
• Ctrl + Shift + M: Create a new message. This is an alternative to the simpler “Ctrl + N” new message shortcut, but it will work no matter where you are in the app (like if you’re viewing your calendar or contacts instead of mail). It’s also the quickest way to get to Boomerang’s powerful compose-based features.
• Ctrl + E: Search. This one moves your cursor to the search bar so you can quickly find a message without rummaging through your inbox or other folders.

Advanced: Create keyboard shortcuts for Boomerang commands in Outlook

For the Outlook pros and the Boomerang veterans, there’s even more productivity to be found when you customize the Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar is the row of buttons at the very top of the Outlook window inside the Title Bar, above the Ribbon and the File menu. Currently, Microsoft’s platform doesn’t allow third-party developers to create keyboard shortcuts, so Boomerang for Outlook doesn’t have them by default. You can, however, create Boomerang shortcuts for yourself by adding Boomerang commands to the Quick Access Toolbar.

1. Install Boomerang for Outlook if you have not already done so.
2. Learn more about the Quick Access Toolbar.
3. Customize the Quick Access Toolbar by adding commands. To add Boomerang commands, follow these steps for adding a command to the Quick Access Toolbar that isn’t on the Ribbon.
4. Outlook automatically creates a keyboard shortcut for all commands in the Quick Access Toolbar. Press and hold the Alt key until numbers appear next to the commands. You can execute a command by pressing Alt + the numbers associated with that command.

If you use Gmail, we also created a Gmail keyboard shortcut cheat sheet that you should check out.

Read receipts is the Boomerang feature that allows you to track opens and clicks on emails you send. It eliminates the guesswork of asynchronous communication: have they read my email, or do I need to follow up because they missed it? And as of today, read receipts is a whole lot smarter, meaning you can make smarter decisions about when and how to follow up on emails you send.

Now, you’ll get even more details about messages you track, including which person opened your email when you send to multiple recipients. We’ve also redesigned an improved experience for managing your tracked messages and added options for how often you get notified about opens.

Powerful, detailed multi-recipient tracking

You asked, we listened: this has been one of our top feature requests, and we’re so excited to be able to share it with you! Previously, tracking wasn’t able to distinguish between recipients when you sent a message to more than one person — but that’s changed with Read Receipts 2.0.

When you email multiple recipients, you will now be able to see who has opened or clicked your message (or neither). These additional details improve accountability and awareness, making it easier to manage a project among a group of collaborators, prepare ahead of a meeting with multiple participants, track your prospective clients’ engagement with a business proposal, and much, much more.

New notification preferences

We’ve added two new options for getting notified when your recipient opens your message. Boomerang’s read receipts have always notified you with an email once any recipient opened your tracked message for the first time. That’s still the default, but now, you can also receive an email notification for the first open by each recipient when you’re emailing a group, or you can disable email notifications entirely.

Improved dashboard experiences

To help you track how multiple recipients are interacting with your emails, we redesigned experiences throughout Gmail and Boomerang. We’ve added more details about who interacted with your message and how recently they did so, and we created a new, dedicated Details page for each tracked message you send. You’ll notice the updates viewing a message in your Sent folder, checking your dashboard on Boomerang’s Tracked Messages tab, or sneaking a peek on the go with Boomerang’s mobile apps*.

ICYMI: Tracking is more accurate, too

In case you missed it, we released some updates to read receipts a few weeks ago in preparation for Read Receipts 2.0, which included making tracking more accurate. Viewing tracked messages in your Sent folder will no longer affect the count of how many times your message was opened, even if you open them on a different device, so you can have more confidence in the stats you see. You’ll also notice cosmetic improvements, like the new “Send + Track” button that appears in the Gmail compose window after you’ve added Boomerang’s Read Receipts to a draft.

Our philosophy

Boomerang’s read receipts will continue to be accompanied by a visible disclaimer in emails you send. This was a decision we made over 11 years ago when we first released read receipts, and it’s one we reaffirmed as we built version 2.0.

One of our company’s guiding principles is respect for the people who use our products. That includes not just the Boomerang users who use tracking, but also the recipients of the emails they send. Other alternatives to Gmail read receipts perform silent tracking and share invasive information about the recipient with the sender. We continue to believe strongly that explicit disclosure and the opportunity to opt out is the right thing to do, both for our users and their email correspondents. Furthermore, our data has consistently shown that including a read receipt with a visible disclaimer in an email you send results in higher response rates. So it’s better for everyone involved!

You’re still here? What are you waiting for?! Add Boomerang to Gmail, send an email with tracking enabled, and experience all the improvements!

For the sixth year in a row, we are proud to contribute a share of Boomerang’s profits towards funding for climate change mitigation research as part of our annual charitable giving. When this effort began, Boomerang’s founders identified a need for additional funding for research on carbon capture technologies. We continue to believe that contributing to carbon capture research projects that are too early for larger, more established funders is the best way for us to make an impact on climate change. And for another year, we are fortunate enough to be able to continue this philanthropic tradition.

Professor Shao-Horn’s proposal presents an intriguing opportunity to reduce pollutants like CO2 that are emitted into the atmosphere during steelmaking. Her research has identified catalysts that, when applied to steelmaking flue gas, demonstrate improved selectivity for CO2 and CO. These materials directly produce methanol from the flue gas, and the improved selectivity is necessary to make this method economically viable at scale. Currently, steelmaking is a major contributor to industrial greenhouse gas emissions. There is significant and growing demand for methanol, and this direct production route is both logistically convenient and economically beneficial. We are excited to support the continuation of this research into improving the selectivity of the catalysts because of the impact it could have on both green methanol production and reduced emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Furthermore, we are also continuing our tradition of funding education for children in Burma. For the 11th year in a row, we’re providing funds to build a new school through our partnership with Build a School in Burma. You can read more about this philanthropic mission by checking out what we wrote after our first donation in 2013.

We would like to thank all the researchers who submitted applications for our 2024 grant. We also extend our gratitude to the Boomerang community, particularly our subscribers. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to do what we love, nor would we be able to give back in this way.

For much of Baydin’s (Boomerang’s) history, we have been fortunate enough to be able to dedicate a share of our profits to charitable causes. We are committed to making a positive impact and putting people at the center of what we do, so we believe it’s essential to give back.

The impact of our giving has included:

• helping build several schools in Burma 
• funding a mobile school bus
• supporting academic labs working on carbon capture technologies

Now, we’re ready to accept applications for this year’s funding to continue the tradition, and we need your help.

Seeking Applications from Carbon Capture Researchers

We’re inviting applications from underfunded, US-based academic labs or research organizations working on carbon capture technology to receive up to $50,000 in funding.

Carbon capture will be a key component of mitigating the effects of climate change and reversing global warming. Many of the big, well-funded players in the space are looking into it. But we’re a startup, and consistent with that ethos, we’re looking for high variance, big swing projects that are still too early for more established funding sources like NSF. Think of this as the pre-seed stage of climate tech funding.

How to Submit Your Proposal

If you are a researcher or a student working on new carbon capture technology and could use some funding, we invite you to submit your application:  

Please include: 

• Name, Organization, and Contact info 
• A one-page proposal attachment describing your proposed or current project details and how you would use the funding 
• Confirmation that your organization is 501c3 eligible and you will be able to provide a tax-deductible receipt

The deadline to apply is November 20, 2024.

If you have any questions, please contact boomerang+carbon@baydin.com. 

Previous recipients of Boomerang’s carbon capture research funding

This will be our sixth year making a contribution to fund carbon capture research. 

• The first year, we donated to an academic lab in Colorado State working on genetically engineered thin film microalgae for carbon capture. 
• In year two, the recipient was part of Project Carbon at UC Davis, working on soil amendment for better carbon sequestration while providing better crop yield. 
• We chose micro-algae-driven carbon capture research led by Dr. Yantao Li at the University of Maryland for Boomerang’s 2021 Climate Donation. You can read more about Dr. Yantao Li’s work here.
• In 2022,  we donated to two projects:
  • Professor Maria Maldonado of the University of California Davis on her research into the respiratory proteins of giant kelp to develop respiration-based strategies to enhance net carbon capture
  • Professor John Coates’ lab at the University of California Berkeley. His proposal involves working on making bioplastics cheaper to manufacture by adapting a species of bacteria to convert methane into bioplastic polymers using perchlorate respiration instead of oxygen respiration. Our team got a detailed look at his research in 2023, and the potential blew us away.
• We also donated to two projects in 2023:
  • Prof. Scott Warren at UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of Chemistry, who is developing membranes for capturing CO2 directly from combustion sources using a material discovered by his research team. This research could potentially lead to a 10-50 fold improvement in membrane performance with reduced energy consumption.
  • Dr. Kyriakos C. Stylianou at Oregon State University, leading a project on bioinspired materials for oceanic carbon capture. The project involves synthesizing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which, when exposed to UV light, selectively capture oceanic inorganic carbon and convert it into value-added products such as methanol.

And we’re looking for this year’s recipient!

Help Us Spread The Word

Help us find where our donation should go! Please share this blog post far and wide, and let’s do our part together.

With Boomerang’s Read Receipts, you can:

• Get notified when your emails are opened
• Track clicks on links inside emails you send
• Improve reply rates with privacy-conscious Read Receipts
• Set conditional reminders to get notified if your message isn’t opened or clicked
• Upgrade your Inbox with more than a dozen other productivity tools

Better accuracy today…

Thanks to the latest update, read receipts are more accurate than ever. Previously, viewing your own message in your Sent folder could not be reliably excluded from the Read Receipts open count, especially when you opened it in a different email app or on a mobile device. But now, you can go ahead and open messages you’ve sent with Read Receipts on any device, and those views and clicks won’t be counted. Only opens by your recipients will be logged, so you can have more confidence in the count you see.

…more improvements on the way!

This is just the beginning! We have more updates to Read Receipts in progress (including tracking which recipients have opened the email and which have not when you send a message to multiple recipients) that we’re excited to share with everyone soon. If you are interested in becoming a beta user to test it out and give us feedback, please let us know by filling out the form here.

Already a big fan of Read Receipts? Have at it, and let us know what you think of the updates. If you’ve been holding off, now’s the time to check it out again!

We’re proud to offer so much value in just one app, and we wanted to highlight two features that can sometimes be “hidden gems” among all the other amazing functionality Boomerang offers.

How to set up a recurring email in Outlook

Recurring emails for Outlook are a simple way to automate sending the same message over and over. Recurring email can replace a reminder you’ve set for yourself and eliminates the need for you to press send manually. Once you’ve written your message, use Boomerang to schedule it to send periodically at an interval you choose. Learn more about how to set up a recurring email in Outlook by visiting Boomerang’s help pages.

How to request a read receipt in Outlook

Boomerang read receipts are a powerful, easy-to-use way to know if your recipient has opened your message. After sending your message, you can get notified by email both when a recipient opens your email and when they click on any link in the message. You’ll be able to follow-up (or not have to) knowing whether your email was read. Boomerang’s read receipts work across platforms, including on mobile devices, so your recipient doesn’t need to open your message in Outlook for you to be notified. Learn more about how to request read receipts in Outlook on our help pages.

We hope these features will become part of your workflow too!

Starting today, you can temporarily override your Inbox Pause schedule when you’re waiting for an important email or plans change without turning off your schedule.

We already know you’re going to love the additional control provided by these new features because temporary overrides were the top request we heard from Inbox Pause users! We’re grateful to everyone who wrote in to let us know this would be helpful.

Try Inbox Pause today. Install Boomerang to get started for free

While your Inbox Pause schedule is active, use the new override features to check (or block) email on an ad hoc basis without disabling your schedule.

Deliver new email now during a scheduled pause

Pause your Inbox during a block of time when it’s scheduled to be unpaused

Visit inboxpause.com to learn more about putting your email on your schedule. When you’re ready to get started, install Boomerang for your Gmail or Outlook account.

Today, we’re excited to release an Inbox Pause update that will make it even easier for you and your team to fight back against email overload and create that space in your day: automated, weekly Inbox Pause schedules.

We heard from the Boomerang community that you wanted more options, and we’re thrilled to share new tools that put your Inbox on your schedule. Whether you want to block out focus time for deep work, protect your downtime to devote full attention to family, friends, and hobbies, or simply make the rhythm of your email more predictable, Boomerang gives you total control. Individuals can create schedules to suit their needs, and entire teams can create Inbox Pause schedules to support workplace wellness policies and expectations around communication norms while granting each team member flexibility.

Inbox Pause has saved over 72,000,000 minutes of disruptions

Inbox Pause began as a hackathon project over a decade (!) ago. Back in those days, we had no idea it would be a hit, so it was built as a separate browser extension — it wasn’t part of Boomerang for Gmail at first. (For a blast from the past, check out the original website, Groupon references and all, via the Wayback Machine.) To be frank, it was pretty buggy at first, because it was engineered using an unsupported, inconsistent workaround, but that changed when Google introduced the Gmail API. Inbox Pause had another coming-of-age moment in 2017 when we moved it into the Boomerang extension.

Over the years, Inbox Pause has saved over 72 million minutes of focus time by blocking disruptive email notifications on all your devices. With Inbox Pause, your email isn’t gone. It’s just moved to a special folder until you’re ready for it to arrive. You have the option to send an autoresponder to any messages you receive while your Inbox is paused so the sender isn’t left wondering. For the most important messages, powerful delivery exceptions allow you to continue to receive email from certain senders.

Your Inbox, your schedule

The new features we’re releasing today are the next milestone in our efforts to help you spend more time on what matters. Automate how you and your team manage the flow of email with Inbox Pause schedules by pausing your Inbox, unpausing your Inbox, and delivering messages in batches according to your needs. Get started right away with one of four settings templates: Work Hours, Focus Time, Batched Deliveries, or Mix and Match.

Work Hours

Set up your Work Hours, and your Inbox will automatically pause work day is done. This is perfect for when your work-life balance needs a little more balance. Use “Work Hours” to set the start and end of each day when email can arrive.

Perfect for: If finding that separation between work and home is getting harder, this is the answer. You’ll only get email during set hours—and not a minute later.

Focus Time

Sometimes, you just need to get things done. Focus Time is the answer for protecting those time blocks when you do deep work. Focus Time schedules allow you to select specific hours during the workday to prevent interruptions by pausing your Inbox.

Perfect for: When you must block off hours during the day to avoid distractions.

Batched Deliveries

Formerly known as “Bring messages into Inbox on a schedule,” Batched Delivery is the feature you already love: email is delivered only a set number of times daily. Forget shiny, new email syndrome: this helps you train your brain away from the constant hit of disruption.

Perfect for: When you’re addicted to the email pings or just need to be in your inbox throughout the day but want to limit the distraction of new emails arriving constantly.

Mix and Match

For those who want it all, Mix and Match allows you to create the ultimate customized schedule every day.

Perfect for: When you need the control to map out a perfect, precise schedule.

Boost your team’s productivity while improving everyone’s wellness with Inbox Pause

With the new schedule features we’re releasing today, Inbox Pause can be the key to your team’s wellness and productivity. The increased stress associated with email interruptions during the workday and after hours not only hurts productivity — it also contributes to burnout and employee turnover. Whether you want to protect your team’s downtime, block interruptions for focused work, or remove the temptation to check email every few minutes, Boomerang can help keep your team happier, get more done, and improve retention. 

Learn more about pausing email for your team, then get in touch with us when you’re ready to schedule a demo.

How to pause your email

Inbox Pause schedules are available starting today for all Boomerang users. Pause your email with Boomerang for Gmail or pause your email with Boomerang for Outlook. All these new features are completely free for individuals for the time being, so everyone can check them out!

You can also pause and unpause your Inbox using Boomerang’s mobile email clients for iOS and Android. Inbox Pause schedules are available in iOS starting today, and they’ll be available for Android soon, too.

Have a question about how to use Boomerang? Visit the Boomerang for Gmail knowledge base or the Boomerang for Outlook knowledge base.

Let us know what you do with your time saved

How are you using the time you used to spend refreshing your Inbox? Please let us know! Whether you’re new to pausing your Inbox or just checking it out for the first time, we want to hear from you. Reach out on Twitter (X) or Linkedin to tell us how it’s going.