Sandy's Your Personal Assistant via Email

from Lifehacker by Gina Trapani

If you live out of your inbox and don't have the luxury of a human assistant, check out newly launched webapp Sandy, an information tracker you interact with via email. Register for a free account and you'll get an email address you can send your to-do's, contacts, bookmarks, notes, and appointments to in keyworded messages. Sandy receives the email, parses, stores, and organizes the information, and emails you back reminders and agendas only when you need 'em.

For example, a message to your sister that cc:'s Sandy and reads:

Remind us to call Mom on her birthday on 9/16/07 @yearly @birthday

Will set up yearly email birthday reminders for Mom from Sandy. Here are a few more ways Sandy can remember important items you want to get off your mind.

All your lists and reminders are available on Sandy's web site as well as via email, and you can set up SMS and Twitter access to Sandy, too. Formatting messages Sandy understands is very easy; you'll see from this cheat sheet the language is natural, as if you were talking to an actual human.

Those of us already getting more email each day than we can handle should configure Sandy to send just the messages we want. Opt in or out of replies to every Sandy command, specific item reminders, and a daily digest of appointments and to-do's. The best part about Sandy is the messages you get back from "her"—helpful and fun, the tone truly makes you feel like you have an assistant backing you up.

Sandy's yet another example of how the command line's making a comeback—except the "command line" is a new email message, not a terminal window, and the commands and responses are in readable, natural language. Overall, Sandy's one of the most evolved reminder systems and remote command line apps available today.

Sandy