I want to be able to specify in my email how soon before the event to be notified

this is something I would love as well. I week's advance notice on all Birthdays would be perfect =)

Hiya!

I see that we can do the X days before in the edit function which is great! But the reminder time is fixed at 6 am which is not! (Too early for an SMS message). Can we add a field to change it like the calender date setting has?

Thanks!
Eric

How about the following

remind me 5 days before Mum's Birthday 23/11 @yearly

I would love to be able to set reminders outside my defaults through email (or IM, or SMS, but those are other threads).

As a fairly hideous workaround, I have been putting dates and times in the text of the item to be remembered. So I get strings like this:
r "Mom's birthday is 12/29" 12/26 @yearly @birthdays

I notice that the sample Valentines reminder uses the keyword 'by', but that it is a synonym for 'on' and does nothing special.

It seems to me that 'by' means 'on or before this date', meaning you'd appreciate occasional reminders in the time leading up to it. So if I say 'Sandy, remind me to tax the car by March 30th', I'd be grateful for a reminder 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, 2 days before, as well as on the day.

It's a chance for some cute secretary phrases: 'I know it's quite a way off, but you asked me to remind you ...'; 'It's just one day until'.

For me, this would meet the same need as the 'x days before' requirements, while sustaining the illusion of a real PA -- if I had a real PA I wouldn't ask them to remind me 3 days in advance. I'd expect them to show initiative and remind me at appropriate times.

In this same vein, I'd like to be able to set extra reminders for tags I've created. The example here is that I have costumed events I'm attending, and need an extra reminder x number of days before the event, reminding me to make sure my outfit is clean and ready to go. I would add a tag I created to each of these events, and I'd like to be able to specify that each event tagged with that particular tag requires an additional reminder x days in advance of the actual event. Each event requires the same number of days advance notice. This could be used to solve the birthday reminder requests in this thread, by allowing users to specify advance reminders for a tag they make (say, @rbirth) that they can add to all of their birthday appointments. That would be fantastic!

has this functionality been added yet? One thing I'm doing is using sandy to remind me about a TV show that's coming up so that I can Tivo it. I can't tivo it until 2weeks before air time so I'd like to set a reminder for that show time then put a handy relative offset like 7 days before on it. thanks.

how about:

r dad's birthday july 4
*n july 1 at 11:00

or something like that? or @n...

you could even require that it be a date instead of 3 days from now or that kind of thing.