Alerts and reminders

Kimori sends only the alerts you have set. Nothing is switched on behind your back, and there is no automatic sending by default.

Alert or reminder?

An alert is what you set on a deadline. A reminder is the email that results from it. This is the same distinction the application makes: you add alerts on the form, and you consult the reminder history on the detail screen.

In return: a deadline must carry at least one alert to be saved. That is deliberate — a date nobody is watching is of no use.

Setting an alert

Every deadline carries its own list of alerts, editable from its form. An alert is set in three parts: when, by what means, for whom.

When

Two ways to fix the moment:

• A lead time before the deadline — four quick choices: 1 month before, 1 week before, 1 day before, on the day. The “Other lead time” option lets you enter any number of days: 45, 120, whatever your trade demands.
• A specific date — when the moment cannot be derived from the expiry date: the preparation meeting, the filing cut-off for a submission.

In both cases you choose the time of sending, in thirty-minute steps. Handy for avoiding an email landing at 3 a.m.

By what means

The “Send an email” switch is set alert by alert. Unticked, the alert still exists — it shows in your calendar if synchronisation is on — but triggers no sending. Useful for a milestone you want to see without being notified about.

For whom

This is the most often overlooked setting, and the most useful. A single alert can warn several people at once: the “Recipients” field opens a list in which you tick who should receive the email.

Recipient	What it does
The deadline owner	Offered at the top of the list and ticked by default. The email goes to whoever owns the deadline at the time of sending.
A member of your organisation	Each one appears by name, with their address. Yours carries the (you) mention.
An address from the address book	Addresses outside your organisation that an administrator has allowed.

“The owner” is you by default

When you create a deadline, you automatically become its owner: that first line therefore means your own address.

It has an edge over ticking yourself by name — if an administrator later hands the deadline to someone else, the reminders follow the new owner, with nobody having to revisit the alerts one by one. See Members and roles.

To be warned about a deadline you do not own, tick yourself by name in the list of members.

An alert with email sending switched on but no one designated would go nowhere: Kimori says so under the list, and refuses to save the deadline until it is fixed.

Warning someone outside

The address book opens up uses that are not obvious at first:

• warn the employee themselves that their medical check-up is due, without creating an Kimori account for them;
• alert your accountant or your broker before a contract expires;
• tell a subcontractor that their insurance certificate is about to lapse.

The recipient needs neither an Kimori account nor membership of your organisation. They simply receive the email. Their address, however, must have been allowed beforehand: you no longer type a free-form address when setting the alert.

Only an administrator can allow a new address

If you are an administrator, the “Add an address” button at the bottom of the recipient list adds it to the address book and ticks it straight away — without leaving the form.

Otherwise the list only offers addresses already allowed: ask an administrator to add the one you need.

The address book is managed under Settings, in the Allowed recipients section. You add an address there and give it a readable name — “Durand & Co” stands out far better than contact@durand-co.com in a list of recipients — and remove it when it no longer belongs.

No need to enter your colleagues: members of your organisation are already in the list, and Kimori refuses to add a member’s address to the address book.

Removing an address stops the reminders aimed at it

An address removed from the address book is no longer allowed: alerts that designated it stop writing to it immediately, with no need to revisit them one by one. Before you confirm the removal, Kimori tells you how many deadlines are affected.

Your existing addresses were kept

If you had entered external addresses in your alerts before the address book existed, they were added to it automatically, under the name “Reprise — alerte existante”: your running reminders carried on as normal. Nothing to do — other than removing those that no longer belong.

Several recipients, or several alerts?

The two combine. One alert warns several people at the same moment; several alerts warn at different moments. The common arrangement: 60 days ahead for the owner, to start the paperwork; then 15 days ahead for the provider, as a nudge.

What to know about sending

Each recipient gets their own email. An alert naming three of them causes three separate sendings, at the same moment and with the same content — there is no Cc and no Bcc. Your subcontractor therefore cannot see that your accountant is warned too, and none of the addresses is exposed to the others.

In practice: in the deadline’s history, an alert with three recipients leaves three lines.

The right to write to an address is checked at the time of sending, not only when you set the alert. If an external address has been removed from the allowed recipients in the meantime, it is simply skipped: the other recipients of the same alert get their email as usual.

Which language a reminder goes out in

Every reminder goes out in the language of whoever receives it. For a member of the organisation, that is the language they picked in their account. For an external address, which has no account, Kimori falls back on the country of the company.

Emails about the account itself — signup confirmation, password — are the exception: they go out in English whatever your language.

Sending is processed in batches, several times an hour: a message may therefore leave a few minutes after the exact time you set.

Each deadline’s detail screen keeps the history of reminders sent and their outcome — useful when a recipient claims to have received nothing.

Suspending a deadline’s alerts

Dealing with it, but the supplier is dragging their feet? The “Snooze” button puts the deadline to sleep until a date of your choosing — see The life of a deadline.