How to add Reminders to Gmail, like in Google Inbox
As Google Inbox is shutting down, let me share a trick to keep adding reminders to Gmail, thanks to IFTTT.
1. Add a “quick note” button on your iPhone
Click the link below to add the “quickly email yourself a note” recipe on your IFTTT account. That recipe relies on the “Note” widget that IFTTT’s app can integrate to your smartphone’s today screen.
You will have to specify your email address to receive the reminders (a.k.a. notes) you will send to yourself using that recipe.
You can even customize the recipe to remove the “[Do Note]” prefix, if you want.
After you do that, you can add the “IFTTT” widget to your iPhone’s Today screen, by clicking the “Edit” button at the buttom of that screen, and them moving the IFTTT widget to the top, like this:
After your confirm that change, your iPhone’s Today screen should display that new “Quicky email to yourself” icon:
Whenever you’ll click on it, a note entry screen will allow you to quickly send a reminder to your inbox:
2. Make sure the notes are visible in your inbox
Now that we’re able to quickly send ourselves a reminder from our smarphone, let’s make sure that these reminders will always show up in our Gmail inbox.
To do that, let’s click on the reminder email we just sent to ourselves on Gmail, and then click the “Filter messages like this” contextual menu:
In the first step of creating that filter, just make sure to have “action@ifttt.com” as FROM email address, then go ahead and click that “Create a filter” button.
In the following step, check the following boxes:
- “Never send to spam”
- “Always consider as important”
- and “Mark as unread” (optional, depending on your preference)
Then click the “Create filter” button.
From now on, your reminders should always be visible from your Gmail’s inbox.
3. Make them look like Google Inbox Reminders
This step is optional but may give you that satisfying feeling of still being in Google Inbox. To give ourselves this impression, we will add the “Reminder” icon from Google Inbox next to each note email that we sent to ourselves.
In order to do that, let’s create a contact from https://contacts.google.com/
Give it the name “Reminder”, and “action@ifttt.com” as email address.
When you’re done:
- Right-click on the icon above to download it;
- then, click the avatar icon at the top left corner of the dialog from Google Contacts and upload the icon you just downloaded, so that it becomes the “avatar” associated to that email address.
Tadaa! Your Gmail inbox should now look like this:
