To sign up for the I Want Sandy service (hereafter, known as Sandy), launch your web browser, the Address or Location bar at the top and press Enter. When the website opens, find the 'Sign Up' flash in the top right-hand comer and click on it. All that's required is a valid email address and password, so type the details into the empty form, then click the Sign Up button. After a moment, Sandy will display the activation message shown here.

Here we've switched back to our email tool (it's Google Mail, but could just as easily be Outlook Express) and opened Sandy's activation email message. It includes a link to a new, unique email address Sandy has generated, which we'll use from now on to create appointments, reminders and tasks. Click on the link to create a reply, then type in a new reminder. Sandy needs certain words to help her understand what's going on, so preface messages with 'remember' or 'remind me' . After that, she's clever enough to understand many simple English constructions.

And here,s sandy in action. Having sent the email in the previous step, Sandy then monitors the task and when the time comes to remind us of our appointment, fires off an email. For people who always have their email program open, it makes a lot of sense to receive reminders like this, rather than using a separate calendar program. Now we're going to look at Sandy's settings by clicking the 'Tweak the way we work ... ' link at the bottom ofthe message.


This opens a browser window that displays Sandy's settings. From here, it's possible to specify whether she should reply to every mail, change the account details,
password, switch on text message reminders (only available in the US so far) add a second email address, and most importantly, set the date and time - without knowing which time zon to work to, Sandy won't be able to email reminders properly. Finished? Scroll to the foot of the screen and click the Save button.

To save typing a the cryptic email address that Sandy assigns to new members (this is deliberate and helps to rninimise spam), create an entry for her in whichever address book is being used. In this example, we've set her up as Sandy in GoogleMail so that from now on, we can just address the reminder emails to 'Sandy', rather than the obscure 'ueiuovei' address that was assigned to us. In this screen, we're firing off our first request for a reminder a dentist appointment that's scheduled.



Continue sending sandy new reminder requests in the same way and she'll be able to build a diary of appointments and tasks. Then, at the beginning of each day, she'll send out a summary of what's going on - this will arrive every morning at the time specified in the settings pages mentioned in Step 4. Each item can be archived for later, 'forgotten' (which essentially removes it) or marked as a 'to-do', which is useful for turning appointments into tasks. Sandy also sends out reminders for individual items as and when they occur.

If a meeting invilves another person, it's also possible to have Sandy remind them as well- even if they're not signed up to the service. Simply send the note to Sandy as usual, then use the email program's CC field to include the other person and they'll receive a reminder as well. (If they don't receive the mail, get them to check their spam folders - some email filters may mark Sandy's messages as spam the first time around). Here, for example, we've asked Sandy to send a message to our friend Beryl, who's also going to be attending this particular meeting.

It's possible to visit Sandy's website and see all of the day's, week's or month's appointments together on a single screen. Go to the website and click the 'Your home page' link. Individual reminders and tasks can be edited by clicking on their name, and afterwards the revised list printed out or emailed out as a fresh copy. It's also possible to set tags from here to help organise tasks and appointments. Just click the link, choose edit and then click in the Tags field. Preface each tag with an '@' sign.

Tags are useful bacause it's possible to use a. them as filters so that only items with a particular tag are displayed. There's another use too: we've created several tasks and assigned the tag 'bills' to them. Next we're going to create an email message with the following text - 'lookup @bills'-and send it to Sandy. This will ask Sandy to scan through all the upcoming items and retrieve those that have the 'bills' tag attached to them.

Sandy has emailed back all of the tasks and appointments that have to do with paying bills or handing out money. The items are sent as a neat summary, so it's easy to see what needs paying when- and the links we talked about in Step 6 make it easy to adjust the details of any upcoming items quickly and easily. These are the basic features of the I Want Sandy service, but there's plenty more to explore.