How to use Apple Mail’s Remind Me and Follow Up features

Of the two, Remind Me is more useful than Follow Up, but mainly because you can set it however you want – and not be able to touch Follow Up.

Follow Up is the seemingly good idea that Apple Mail will put your sent email at the top of your inbox if someone hasn’t replied to your email within a period of about three days, to remind you to do something about it Companies.

There is nothing else at the moment. For example, you cannot indicate that you want to be reminded about this email and not that one.

The tracking works entirely through machine learning and decides when you are reminded – and which emails you are reminded of. Presumably this will improve once a billion iPhone owners use it, but for now it seems virtually random which messages it chooses to track.

Worse still, emails are regularly surfaced to which you may not have received a reply, but which you also never expected. Thank a customer for the information and you may be reminded.

All you can do is grope when that message pops back up at the top of your inbox. Grumpy about it and swipe to archive, hoping it archives and doesn’t somehow delete this thing

Follow Up is a feature with good intentions, but it’s also clearly a 1.0 release where we’ll see improvements next year.

This is also a 1.0 feature, but it’s a better, more useful addition. However, there’s no chance Apple won’t iterate in iOS 17 and the next macOS next year, as this feature could do a lot more.

It’s everything third-party competitors like Gmail and Sanebox have been doing for years too. So if Apple’s Remind Me catches on, we’ll see some needed improvements.

You have to receive and handle a lot of emails to even notice this, but if you do, Remind Me can come in handy.

Suppose you get an email at 10 am that is important but not urgent. You don’t have to act on it now, but you can’t forget it either.

So you tell your Mac or iPhone to remind you later. How you do this will vary slightly by device, but you’ll always get these options:

1. Remind me in 1 hour
2. remind me tonight
3. remind me tomorrow
4. remind me later

Despite the way it’s listed after the other options, remind me later is not only limited to times after tomorrow. You can set any date you want to be reminded of this email.

And by default, it’s the date you want to be reminded of, not the date and time. If you choose remind me laterthere is a date picker, but it includes a switch to turn on the time.

Tap on it and you can now set it to remind you of the email in one minute, 79 minutes, two weeks from Tuesday at 1am and so on.

These are your only options, your only controls, and at first it looks like nothing happened.

The email you marked as a reminder will remain in your inbox even if it remains unread. However, there will now be a new, temporary Outbox called Remind Me.

You won’t see this unless you’ve opened Mail’s mailbox list, but it’s there until you’re reminded of the message.

Select “Remind Me” in iOS 16 Apple Mail inbox

Then what happens at the moment you want to be reminded is this:

• The email goes back to the top of your inbox
• It has a “remind me” banner

What it doesn’t do is beep like the email message is new. If you’ve read it before, Mail doesn’t mark it as unread when it first arrives.

So you don’t hear anything and your notification badge doesn’t appear.

That means you won’t end up seeing it until the next time you go to Mail. And that also means that every time you go into Mail before the reminder time, you’ll see the message right where it was.

The idea is that you get so many emails that important ones can so easily slide off the screen and disappear from view. But if you don’t get that many emails, that one message gets pushed down from where you can see it.

And you’ll see it every time you log into Mail. Remind Me should goad you at your chosen time, but it should also hide that message until then.

The goal of a Remind Me feature, or snooze as Google calls it, is actually twofold. One is the memory, but the other keeps it out of your mind until you’re ready.

Because Remind Me emails appear in a temporary Remind Me inbox, Apple should hide them from your inbox. That would put them off you, but you can always go to that temporary Remind Me inbox if you’d like that email back sooner.

It’s also not like you can hide the email yourself. Apple Mail is robust enough that if you move a message, third-party apps like OmniFocus can still find it if you tap an old link.

With Apple Mail, if you move an email from your inbox to another location yourself, you immediately lose the Remind Me preference. Oddly enough, however, it remembers the reminder time you set earlier when you put it back in the inbox.

On Mac, you can select Message or Reminder, or right-click an email in the inbox

If you’re looking at Mail’s inbox on iOS, instead of being inside the message itself, you can swipe next to that email. From the options that appear, tap Remind me.

Alternatively, if you’re reading the message, tap the reply icon and scroll down to Remind me on the displayed list.

On Mac, you can right-click the message in the inbox to get one Remind me Possibility. Or you can choose them news menu in mail, then Remind me.

If you change your mind and want to act on an email now instead of waiting for a reminder, just do it now. Open the email in your inbox and reply or do whatever you need to.

The message will still appear at the top of your inbox at the time you set. But you could just archive it at that time or any time up to the reminder time and the reminder will be cancelled.

Alternatively, you can go to the Remind me temporary inbox, tap the message, and then select To edit.

From there you can set a different time you want to be reminded – or you can type remove reminder to cancel it.