No, I am not referring to the campus fad from the early to late ’70s where you run naked on the football field. I am also trying to not think about some of you are old enough to have done that, but back to the story. I am talking about a very interesting Google Chrome Browser extension I have been using successfully for several months now.
Streak is found at streak.com. It is an add-in or “extension” to the browser that gives you several features that are not available to the browser
normally. To define an extension, it is a small application which is added to the browser to give it additional features and capabilities. I have talked about some before and will again, so stay tuned.
Streak has several interesting features that you can use. As with all software some are free and some have a monthly fee to use them. I, of course, will only talk about the free version.
The free version does two things that I like very well. I first started using them at work and now use them at home, on a case-by-case basis.
First, have you ever sent an email to someone, like me, to ask me a tech question. After it goes unanswered for a few days (sorry about that) you start to wonder if they have ever read it or not. Just to get it out of the way now, I sometimes get hundreds of emails, many are spam, many are not. I will take days to get to some of them. If you use the Streak extension, it will inform you when I have at least opened your email. You do not know if I have read it or not but at least you will know that I am aware of your question. I will either answer back immediately or put it off until later and sometimes forget. So, if I do not answer you in a week email again, I will not be offended. But again, by using Streak, you can see when it was opened.
One warning is that you should not be confused. It will also let you know when you open the message to read it again. You may think it was the person you sent it to; however, it could very well be you that opened it. It does not inform you exactly who looked at it but just that is was opened.
The other thing it does really well is that it will allow you to send an email at a future date and time. Say, for instance, you want to send out a birthday or congratulations email to a friend. Let us also pretend that you will be out of town that day or like me, you may just forget to send it. Write the email exactly as you want it to be. Then use the send later function in Streak and tell it to send this email at 5:29 pm on Friday, 7/15/19. Then you can shut down Gmail and it will still send the email then. You cannot send emails greater than 12 months or so in the future. So, I cannot set up birthday wishes that will go out each year. (Click the Streak Demo below.)
Oh yeah, then you can also see when they opened it. This is a pretty slick program for the price. Oh, did I mention that the above is free? The free version has a couple of other features which I have not used. You should check it out if the ones described sound interesting.
Streak Demo
The demo will open in another tab,
so you may return here.
