Compared to other technologies on the web, email hasn’t evolved much. Unfortunately for us, email providers are generally satisfied with the status quo but Zenbe wants to change that. Zenbe is an email startup begun by folks who were dissatisfied with the lack of innovation. The Zenbe team is dedicated to taking email into the future with new features and fresh ideas.
So what makes Zenbe different? There are a lot of things, but here are the highlights.
A while back, Sharninder took you through Gmail Labs and some of the cool features that they were offering Gmail users. Well the other day, they brought out another new feature and this is one that I will personally find really useful as Make Use Of editor - “canned responses”. I’m sure if you do a lot of emailing, you will find it really useful too.
“Canned responses” is a feature which allows you to save standard email templates inside Gmail and then use them later by dropping down the menu and selecting which one you want.
OtherInbox claims to be “the cure for email overload.” I’ve been part of the beta test for a few weeks now and I simply love it. Instead of giving you a single email address, OtherInbox gives you the ability to create multiple addresses in your own subdomain (myusername.otherinbox.com). These addresses can be used to sign up anywhere. The service officially supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and (for those of you stuck at work) Internet Explorer.
Example time:
Let’s say that I want to sign up for PossiblyShadySite.com but don’t want to give out my real email address, potentially passing it to spammers. Instead, I register with the address
Here at Make Use Of, we’re big fans of Gmail and use it all the time. We love the interface, the features and above all, It just works.
But, as with all software, there is room for improvement and although Google has been adding features to Gmail at a dizzying pace, there’s only so much they can do, without breaking up the thing for a whole bunch of users.
And that is where Gmail Labs come in. My guess is that the Gmail team at Google got tired of deciding if a feature was good enough to be in Gmail and so have designed Gmail Labs to let the users decide, which is an awesome idea if you ask me!
I have dealt with my fair share of Outlook failures in the corporate and home environments. A lot of people don’t know about the Outlook 2GB PST limit in some older versions of Outlook and it causes havoc when it hits. You can send email just fine and even receive small messages. If you delete some messages you can get some more - but there is not any warning or errors associated with this.
So let’s get down to the underlying cause - Why do you have so much stuff in your Outlook? Are you just keeping everything there as a backup, maybe it is your central repository?
Google Calendar is a great, if not the best available tool to share calendars. However, it’s tedious to edit and keep track of it via the web interface. In saving time, integration is your best friend.
Naturally, there is a vast amount of addons and tools to sync, integrate and simply work more efficiently with Google Calendar. For example you can sync it with mobile devices like the Blackberry or iPhone using GoogleSync. Then you can add Google Calendar to Gmail with several different Greasemonkey scripts. Now I will explain how to add it to Thunderbird.
I have used many different email addresses in my 10+ years on the Internets. I started with a email address from Brooklyn College, moved on to Hotmail and then several custom domains. I would ping-pong between different corporate emails and amusingly geeky personal ones. But being an Admin by profession I have kept all my craptastic forwards geektacular jokes “Historical Emails”.
Your favorite Admin is back with another tip that helps me out while I am managing my plethora of daily emails.
Sometimes I am mobile and I need to follow up on an email later. I can send it back to myself so it’s unread or add a reminder. When I am at my desktop I use flags to follow up but they are unavailable on my mobile.
I want an automatic solution and here is what I use. Hit Me Later is a web site that allows you to forward messages to them with a number or day of the week as the email address and they will re-send you that message according to your variable.
Mozilla Thunderbird is an Outlook-like email client, but way better. It’s free, it’s multi-platform, it’s multi-lingual and most importantly, it’s highly customizable featuring lots of useful addons and themes. In case you’re new to it than you can read about it here, otherwise jump directly to must-have section below.
TOP 10 Thunderbird Addons (must-have)
(1) Contacts Sidebar - handy addon that lets you display all available address books in Thunderbird sidebar. This lets you easily access all your contacts from the main window, quickly edit contact details, drag’n drop files on top of a contact to send it as an attachment and more… (Thunderbird: 1.5b – 2.0.0.*)
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