This has been suggested over and over for 23 months. There are various hacks and workarounds, but it's such an obvious omission from RTM, which is for the most part so well thought out. I think it's time to fix this.

E.g., http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/ideas/264/

I agree, i have been using RTM for a relatively short time, and was really surprised that I wasn't able to do this.

I can't use RTM until this is fixed for the reason I stated.

MOST to-do list managers have only a general reminder for tasks. Maybe there are some calendar apps that do have reminders for individual events , but its pretty rare.
Remindmenow, I'd think a long and hard before making this the deal maker. you might be back here before you know it.

I absolutely can't live with it the way it is carib.

Well.... the best I can do is to suggest a few simple workarounds. Like i said, most to do list managers do the one size fits all reminder(some don't do reminders at all), so I think you're stuck.
Workarounds
1. Use Google Calendar or another calendar app for birthdays/anniversaries, (they have individual reminders), RTM for the rest of your tasks.

2. The two reminder solution. If X's birthday is December 1, set a reminder for November 16 " Get ready for X's birthday", then set another reminder for December 1, " Go to X's Birthday" Its pretty simple to set the second reminder -you don't even have to lift your hands from the keyboard. To use a cliche, even a caveman could do it :-).
3. Set one reminder for November 16 , titled "get ready for X's birthday on December 1". When the reminder pops up on November 16, you can always just reset the reminder for December 1.

Hope this helps.

I'd even jump to pro for more fine-grained reminder control, e.g.
- Priority X and above goes to my cell phone, otherwise skype me
- List Y has weekday-only reminders
- Event Z has reminders by cell and skype every 6 hours

There should be a default reminder which you can set in "Settings".

These reminders (email, sms, skype etc) should show up on every task. If you want the default, just leave it... or you can change it for this task. And also be able to choose not to be reminded at all...

I would also get a Pro Account for this ability...

I mean, this feature should be in the free account, but then RTM would give me enough services to justify the bought.

This is very very important. I used to use Outlook for task management, but switch to RTM, expecting similar features. Having a global setting for reminders is unacceptable. Some things need 2 hour reminders, some need 2 day reminders, some need 2 week reminders, etc.

i also was very surprised that this ability was not in RTM. I know nothing about the backend (but i am a webapp developer), but it would seem to me that no matter how convoluted the Database is, there would be a simple way to enable this.

Give us a box to enter how much time prior we want to get a reminder, and on the backend, just dupe that task and hide it by ignoring anything that has a parent task. So obviously, a task would need a new db column of ParentTaskID.
If the parent task gets deleted, just delete any tasks with a matchin parenttaskid. Don't display tasks with parentIDs. if the parent task changes, trickle the change down to the child task.

Of course that may not be ideal, but it would work and give probably every single user of RTM a warm fuzzy.

yeah, c'mon again guys another thread, as a pro user, I believe more options are need.

I agree. I want to be reminded a week before birthdays and twenty minutes before appointments. A global reminder doesn't help me accomplish this. Please change this.

I hope someone is working on this feature. I am currently testing out whether RTM will be my main task manager and this is a critical feature to have.

How about a "bugging" or "reminder snoozing" feature.

"Call Bob Smith at Thursday 11AM. Remind: 15 minutes before. Bug: every 5 minutes."

This way, at 10:45AM I get a reminder. And if I didn't pay attention to it, I could get a second reminder 5 minutes later and continue to get reminder every 5 minutes until the task is marked complete or the item due date/time is moved.

I would even be happy if I could just set reminders for all task items within a single list (or smartlist).

Then I could tag an item with something like ".alarm," and then make a smartlist that displays .alarm, and then have reminders sms'ed to me from that list.

-Warr

OMG. I'm migrating from Outlook to another application (per my company's edict) and they don't have a task mgmt tool. I read up on RTM and saw that it had so much that I installed it right away.

Never in a million years did I think that it would be so feature rich yet omit such a basic task management function.

Hard for me to justify adding this tool w/o such a glaring omission. I'll use Notepad and unsubscribing.

Ok guys, we REALLY need this tool BADLY

Yes, please add!

It's the first thing I tried to do (for example, email birthdays), but there is no way to do it. I'd even upgrade to Pro if it had it!!

Please, at least put some sort of response on the FAQ!

I just created my account, was surprised that you can't set individual reminders on the tasks. Would be really great if it was implemented.

I agree. This would be useful.

Consider a contract. What I want to see is the contract end date, but I also need a reminder in advance to make sure I renew or cancel.

+1 for per task reminders

I'd push the button on a pro account right this minute if you could hook this up.

A remind date would also be useful to search on since some tasks can't be started until a certain date.