FollowUpThen provides several shortcuts to cancel unwanted followups. These shortcuts are great for quickly canceling followups from your inbox, preventing duplicate followups during a long conversation and for just keeping your inbox clutter-free.

cancel@followupthen.com
After you schedule a followup, forward that email or any email later in the same thread to cancel@followupthen.com.

“-c” Flag
If you are scheduling a new followup and wish to cancel previous related followups, append “-c” to your time format. For example, ‘3days-c@fut.io’ will schedule a followup for 3 days while simultaneously searching for duplicate followups to cancel.

Depending on your workflow, you can add this option to every followup using default flags.

How Earlier Followups Are Found
In FollowUpThen Version 3, we provide two options, configurable from your Settings > Notifications page:

• Cancel if only subjects match, not message-id. (Less strict)
  If you choose to enable this option, we will look for any followups with a subject exactly matching the email just forwarded, minus any “Fwd:” or “Re:” prefixes. If more than one is found, we will ask which you would like to cancel.⚠️ Note: If you schedule many followups with exactly the same email subject, we do not advise using this method, since a followup could get accidentally cancelled. (Leave on your notifications for cancelled messages if you are unsure).
• Cancel based on message-id (default)
  We use the headers of your email (the References and Message-ID, specifically) to find earlier followups on the same thread. As above, if exactly one matching followup is found we cancel it, otherwise we respond with a list of followups to cancel. Message IDs can get lost as emails are forwarded and relayed, so there may be times when we cannot find a matching email on the same thread.

The current version of FollowUpThen only searches by subjects (the first option) not Message-ID.

Reply All “CC” Followups
If your recipient “replies all” to an email where FollowUpThen was cc’ed, you may no longer need the reminder. In this scenario, we send an (optional) email asking you if you’d like to keep the reminder.

Notification Options
Your general settings page has options to enable or disable cancellation notifications. Once you get used to a cancellation workflow, you may wish to disable some these.

How this works
The “-c” and cancel@followupthen.com options work by searching for followups with matching subjects (minus the “Fwd:”, “Re:”, etc). If we find exactly one, we’ll cancel it on the spot. If more than one matching followup is found, we’ll respond with a list of matching followups. If none are found, no response is returned.