By Kevin Purdy

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Missing cool events, hot jobs, great deals, and important news stinks. Having an inbox stuffed with email alerts is just as bad. Here's how to stay alert with the best email alert services, but avoid a cluttered inbox.

With a smart inbox setup, you can choose to see all the new things you're interested in—albums from your favorite artists, new episodes of favorite TV shows, Facebook and Twitter happenings, local concerts, and more—without having all those alerts become inbox annoyances you're more apt to ignore than mark on your calendar. You can check in once a day, on breaks, or whenever you want to see what's coming up, and save your inbox for things you actually need to act on. We'll start off this guide by highlighting our favorite email alert services, covering everything from TV and concert alerts to notifications for Facebook or cellphone minutes. After setting up your various alerts, we'll explain how to use smart email filters to keep your inbox clean and your alerts useful.

The way we're setting this up, it's best to go ahead and sign up for these services first, then filter them all down. So let's get right to it: our picks for the best alert services for almost anything you'd like to monitor:

Media

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Upcoming (Live) TV Shows: Crap I Missed It!
Without even having to create an account, you can enter in shows you're trying to keep up with on live TV, and Crap I Missed It will email you early every morning when there's a new episode that night.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events TV Shows Available for Streaming: Sidereel
Sidereel does a pretty good job of keeping track of new episodes, like Crap I Missed It. But it does a much better job of notifying you when episodes of your favorite shows are available for streaming on Hulu, the major network sites, and even a few places that aren't 100 percent official that just so happen to have that episode you were looking for handy—perfect for those of you who've ditched cable to watch your TV online.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Alternate: Hulu Coming Soon
If there's a particular episode of a show you know you're going to miss, head to Hulu's Coming Soon section, click the envelope/email icon next to that episode, and you'll get a ping when it's available on Hulu. If there's a show you're always watching on your computer or TV-connected system, "subscribe" to it (the enveloped icon with a plus sign in it), log into Hulu, click on "Queue" in the upper-right corner of the site, and enable "Subscription updates" and "Expiration alerts" in the Email alerts section, and you'll get updates when episodes go up, or down, on anything you watch.

Movies Near You: Nothing (Yet)
Honestly, you'll probably know when big films with notable ad budgets are going to be playing at the local multiplex—if you want to stay on top of a particular flick, though, try Crap I Missed It. Otherwise, keep a Google search for "movie:14222" handy in your browser, cellphone, or memory. If you know of a service that can alert about particular movies being available in an area, tell us about it in the comments!

Events

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events
Nearby Concerts: Bandsintown: If you're a frequent user of streaming music services Last.fm or Pandora, you've already created a list of favorite artists through your picking and choosing. Head to Bandsintown, enter your Last.fm or Pandora username, and you'll get a dummy account set up with your favorite/liked artists. Give Bandsintown your location, feed it your email, and you'll get pinged whenever a band you like, or probably like (based on your habits), is playing in a certain radius (that you adjust) to your hometown.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Facebook Events:
Head to your Events page, look at the bottom of your listing, and you'll find a (tiny) "Export events" link. Click it, copy the URL shown in the pop-out, and load it into the master calendar reminder we'll set up below using Google Calendar.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Every Other Event: Google Calendar
Simply put, Google Calendar is the master tool for reminding yourself of things happening in the future. Many sites offer feeds you can load into Google Calendar, GCal can sync with any desktop calendar, and it can email you at very specific reminder intervals of your choosing. After creating an event, look in the lower-right side for email reminder setup for that event. Want to change the defaults of when GCal reminds you? Head to the Settings link, choose Calendar Settings, head to the Calendars section, then click Notifications next to the calendar of events you want to change up. I tend to stick with far-out reminders (two weeks, one week, two days) of work tasks, two-day and five-hour reminders of personal events, and variations of those schemes for other things, like the Birthdays calendar you can enable and base off your Google Contacts data.

Facebook, Twitter, and Ego Stuff

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Everything You Only Want Once a Day: NutshellMail
We've previously detailed how NutshellMail makes the Niagara-Falls-like volume of email updates from Facebook manageable as a once, twice, or however-many-times-per-day email roundup. If you're not using it and complaining about Facebook spam, you should be.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Your Name and Others on the Web—Google Alerts: Google's still the biggest name in the game for keeping track of what people, sites, and other entities are saying about you, your business, or anything you're keeping tabs on. Luckily, Google Alerts can condense everything it finds on a search term into a daily email digest, usually delivered early in the morning. You could try the "As it happens" setting, but for some folks, that's definite overkill. Most of us can get by with just one ego indulgence per day.

Money, Bills, and Jobs

Low Balance and Credit Balance Alerts: Mint.com
You could set up individual reminders and email alerts with your individual banks, investment accounts, and credit cards, but it's a lot smarter to aggregate them in Mint.com, where you can set up the precise amounts you consider worrisome and avoid overdraft fees.

Cellphone Minutes: OverMyMinutes
You'll need to have set up an online access account with your cell provider—and Sprint, apparently, has some issues with it—but OverMyMinutes can ping you just before you start getting charged for excess voice minutes or text messages.

Job Hunting/Prospecting: Simply Hired and DIY Tools
SimplyHired has long offered a combined search of job boards, local classifieds, and other sources, and offers email alerts for your specific job criteria. There are, of course, many places to look for jobs, including government sites, that don't get indexed by search engines and don't offer RSS feeds or email alerts. You can get around that by creating your own feeds and converting them to email alerts.

Filter All Those Email Alerts the Smart Way

Now you've got a whole lot of emails streaming into your inbox, and three days from now, you'll be sick of them. Here's how to set them up in your Gmail inbox so they're only visible, on the side, when they need to be. I'll be working with Gmail here, because it's the best at creating and maintaining inbox filters and as-needed labels; you can, apparently, pull off a similar kind of inbox tidying with the newly released Windows Live Hotmail and its "Sweep" function. Outlook and Yahoo Mail users, too, should be able to replicate these steps, substituting folders for labels.

Create Labels For Your Categories: First things first—search out one of the emails coming in from your email alert services. In this example, I'm hunting down the Crap I Missed It emails I receive to inform me when new episodes of my favorite shows are airing that night (second-to-last Lost tonight!). So I search out "crap i missed," click on one of the emails, hit the More actions menu, then choose "Filter messages like these."

In most cases, Gmail will automatically fill out the "From" field with the address your alert service sends from, and you'll see all those alerts listed below your filter parameters. If you're only getting one email, expand the search by entering the name of the service in the "Has the words" field, hit the Test Search button, and ensure you're catching everything. Now hit "Next Step."

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events At this final screen, you're going to come up with a name for the label that catches this email alert, and any others in a similar category. Select "Create New Label" from the label menu, and choose something appropriate—I'm picking "TV" over "Crap," both to keep my inbox classy and make sure my lizard brain notices there's something shiny on the tube tonight. You'll generally want to pick "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)." If it's a particularly important email alert you're filtering, you can have it sent to your cellphone, by clicking "Forward to" and using one of the email-to-SMS conversion addresses Adam listed in the third part of his explainer. Hit Create Filter, and you're on your way.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events Color Those Labels: Your label will show up on the left-hand panel of your Gmail inbox. If it doesn't, click the "X more" label underneath your basic label list, and you'll see it down below. (You can drag and drop to reorder labels in the Gmail sidebar, so if your new label isn't where you want it, just drag it toward the top of your list.) Click the color box to the left of your new alert label, and give it a color that relates to its identity. As you can see, I've turned Netflix notifications red, Facebook updates (through NutshellMail) blue, and TV green because, well, that's how I see it.

The Set-It-and-Forget-It Guide to Never Missing Important Events

Keep Those Labels Auto-Hidden: Click on the colored box next to your label again, then select "Manage Labels" from near the bottom. You'll head to a Settings page that lists all your default system labels, along with your self-created alert labels. The nifty setting to note here is "Show if unread," which keeps your alert label hidden unless there's a new unread message inside it. Choose it for all your email alert labels.

This way, you can see new notifications of stuff you kind of want to be on top of—new Radiohead album, ahoy—but only in a sidebar, when-I-get-to-it way. Your inbox remains the domain of actual messages from real people.

That's one Lifehacker editor's suggestion on great alert services and a filtering system for them. What other email alerts do you find invaluable? How do you handle their constant onslaught of messages? We want to hear about your system in the comments. View comments »