Outlook is part of Microsoft’s Office suite. It comes with a lot of extra features compared to Outlook Express, including time/event management, contact management, and Microsoft Exchange Server support to synchronize and share information.

Arguably, Outlook Express is a good enough tool for those who don’t expect a lot of flexibility from their software. But what if you want more without having to spend money? Which free alternatives to Outlook should you look into?

Thunderbird

What is it?

Thunderbird is Mozilla’s desktop eMail client. As such, it’s an open source application and supports various addons, which enhance its functionality.

Like Outlook, Thunderbird supports POP, IMAP, and SMTP. Using the Account Wizard, you also can subscribe to RSS News & Blogs, hook up to your Newsgroup account, and launch a quick Gmail setup.

What makes it a better alternative to Outlook?

Thunderbird is available not just for Windows, but also for Mac OS X and Linux. Localized versions of Thunderbird exist for dozens of the most common languages.

Thunderbird is much better than Outlook, in case you enjoy to customize your eMail client. There is a vast collection of themes and extensions available. These will also cover up for most features that are not integrated into Thunderbird by default.

MakeUseOf has dozens of articles regarding Thunderbird. Below is a small selection:

• Saikat wrote How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails.
• Mark explained how to Synchronize Your Google Contacts, Calendar & RSS In Thunderbird.
• Kyle showed you how to Update Your Thunderbird Address Book with Address Crawler.
• I have written articles explaining How to Set Up Message Filters in Thunderbird, How To Integrate Google Calendar Into Thunderbird, and How To Recover Deleted eMails in Thunderbird.

Gmail

What is it?

Gmail or Google Mail is Google’s free webmail client.

Although it is only an online eMail application, Gmail is a very powerful tool that easily rivals most common desktop clients. Gmail supports POP and IMAP and it is fully integrated with the Google Apps suite.

What makes it better than Outlook?

The clear advantage of an online eMail client is its global availability. Wherever you go, whichever computer you use, your eMail is already there.

Gmail provides a complex selection of settings and features. Gmail tracks conversations and optionally compiles all eMails belonging to one conversation into a single thread. Within settings you can create filters, enable Google Mail Labs experimental features, manage multiple inboxes, and switch themes.

There are tons of Gmail hacks that provide interesting options. MakeUseOf has covered them extensively. Here are some of the highlights:

• Mark has compiled a list of Essential Shortcuts to Browse through Gmail faster.
• Saikat covered 5 Ways To Create Custom Multiple Signatures in GMail.
• David shared 7 Tips to Make Gmail The Best Free Email Service For Productive People.
• Sharninder explained How To Access & Use Gmail Offline.
• Karl wrote about How To Backup Your Gmail account To YOUR Hard Drive.
• Aibek revealed 1 Awesome Gmail tip You Didn’t Know about.

Angelina has written a series of posts on How To Turn Gmail Into a Multitasking Machine. In Part 1 she explains how to best configure Gmail, how to consolidate your eMail, and set up labels. In Part2 she provides tips for eMail filtering. Finally, in Part 3, Angelina explores options for the sidebar and the use of multiple inboxes.

Zimbra Desktop

What is it?

Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop is a desktop eMail client that rivals Gmail, Thunderbird, and Outlook alike. Interestingly, it is powered by Mozilla.

What makes it a better alternative to Outlook?

Much like its Mozilla companion Thunderbird, Zimbra is available in 20 different language versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The design is sleek and Zimbra offers several more theme options. Best of all, it’s easy and intuitive to use with a ton of useful features.

Zimbra supports its own online webmail client Zimbra as well as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Microsoft Live Hotmail, AOL Mail, Microsoft Exchange IMAP, IMAP, and POP.

Zimbra has a built-in calendar, contacts, task manager, documents, and briefcase.

Obviously, language integration is not yet perfect. Although I selected the US English language installation and confirmed this language preference within options, some tabs and menus are still displayed in the language of my operating system: German. This should not be an issue if you select the language of your operating system.

Zimbra synchronizes eMails, contacts, and calendars with Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail.

Like Gmail, Zimbra offers an optional conversation view, i.e. threaded conversations. It also comes with advanced tagging options.

Contacts can be grouped and tagged, you can add photos, and import/export via .csv files is supported.

Zimbra comes with great search features. You can quickly search your mailbox for all or specified item types or use the advanced search to add several search criteria, such as file size, date and time, tag, status, folder, and more. The best is that searches can be saved as virtual folders.

Zimbra extensions are called Zimlets.

For more details on how Zimbra compares to Outlook and Thunderbird, check out the Feature Comparison list.

Runners-Up

If none of the above alternatives seem entirely satisfying to you, please have a look at the following two clients:

IncrediMail was reviewed by Saikat: Have Some Fun With This Email Client (Windows).
Zenbe received a review from Sam: All Your Emails In One Place.

What is your favorite eMail client and what makes it valuable to you?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
• How to Email Smarter With Buit-In Time Zone Converters (8)
• MUO Polls: Do You Check Email Online or Use A Desktop Client? (37)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)

Did you know that eMails in the Thunderbird eMail client are not terminally deleted?

Even if you empty the trash folder, they are not physically removed, neither from the trash folder, nor from the original folder. Yes, this does mean that you can recover those eMails. However, that will be the subject of another story.

The issue here is that Thunderbird will grow to an enormous size if all the spam and mails you have trashed are never actually removed. In fact, the traces are multiplied if you move mail from one folder to another and this will add to the size of each of these folders.

So let me explain how you can finally and forever get rid of deleted eMails and thereby reduce the size the Thunderbird eMail client takes up on your hard drive.

The process of terminally removing traces of moved or trashed eMails from folders is called compacting. There are two ways to do this and they’re both rather simple.

Automatic Compacting

Per default, automatic compacting is not enabled in Thunderbird. To enable it, go to > Tools > Options > Advanced tab > Disk Space section and check the box next to > “Compact folder when it will save over …” and set a KB value. The default value is 100 kB.

Thunderbird will now start compacting folders automatically, whenever it saves a reasonable amount of disk space.

WARNING

The problem here is that your Thunderbird eMail client may not respond well at random, at moments when the critical value was reached to set off folder compacting.

Besides, you should not do anything other than reading eMails while folders are being compacted. Otherwise folders can get corrupted or you could lose data. For example eMails you were writing when compacting started may refuse to send or save.

In other words, automatic compacting can be very annoying, especially in situations where you need to use it urgently.

SOLUTION

There are two solutions. If you’re an experienced user, you can customize folder compacting using the Config Editor. If you can’t be bothered with config editing, you should compact folders manually.

Customize Compacting

Automatic folder compacting is still feasible if you make Thunderbird ask for permission before it starts. That way it’s still automatic and you don’t have to think about it, but you won’t be interrupted for good at random intervals.

To open the Config Editor, go to > Tools > Options > Advanced > General and click the > Config Editor button in the bottom right.

In the > Filter: line type > mail.purge.ask to see whether the entry exists. If it does, double-click to set the value to > true.

If the entry does not exist, right-click on any entry and select > New > Boolean and enter > mail.purge.ask as the preference name. Finally, select > true and click OK.

Manual Compacting

To entirely avoid random disruptions due to automatic folder compacting, do it manually whenever you deleted a bunch of spam or an eMail you want to remove for good.

This process is incredibly simple as well. Just right-click on a folder you wish to compact and select > Compact from the menu.

The status bar will display the progress of folder compacting. As stated in the warning above, be sure not to do anything within Thunderbird, while the process is underway!

The status bar will also announce when compacting was completed.

For a trash folder I had never compacted and which contained almost four thousand messages, compacting took less than a minute.

If you run into problems, please refer to the comprehensive coverage regarding Compacting Folders on the mozillaZine.

How do you keep your eMail client slim and speedy?

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• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• 3 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft Outlook (19)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• Re:Subj – An Easy Temporary Inbox for Group Discussions (9)

I have and let me tell you it’s interesting, but very confusing. It definitely takes time to get used to and it has the potential to steal more of your valuable time and attention than any tool ever has. You can count on my word and people’s creativity.

What if you’re looking for an efficient and simple tool to communicate that will not clog up your inbox, steal your attention or be complicated to use. Is there any hope? Would I be writing this if there wasn’t?

Re:Subj is a group communication tool. It serves as a temporary inbox, allowing people to exchange information outside their ever crowded standard inbox. Before I expand all the advantages of Re:Subj, let me give you a quick run-through and explain how it works.

Setting up a temporary group inbox is easy as pie. Go to the website and fill in the blanks, i.e. a subject line, recipient eMail addresses, a first message, and your own eMail address. You can decide whether the inbox shall be public and whether you want threaded comments. If you’re unsure, don’t worry. Everything but the subject and your first message can be changed later on! Once you’re done hit the Create an Inbox button.

Re:Subj will instantly mail all recipients and yourself a link to the temporary inbox, as displayed in the screenshot below.

The cool thing is, you can choose whether you want to reply through your standard eMail and eventually check the entire list of replies and comments, or whether you prefer to read and reply through the website only. That way, everyone gets what they want.

Following the link in the eMail, you will enter the temporary inbox and see an overview of what everybody has had to say so far.

You can post a new reply or, in case threaded comments are enabled, reply to a previous comment. If you’ve had enough and no longer care about the discussion, you can use the respective link in the right-hand menu to leave this inbox.

The following screenshot shows what an temporary inbox will look like after a few replies and comments have been posted.

As the creator of a temporary inbox you will see a different menu to the right of an inbox than everybody else.

To add more participants, you can send invitations to their eMail address. You can also remove participants by clicking the red-Xed blue man next to their eMail address.

As promised earlier, you can change the inbox settings, i.e. enable or disable threaded comments or make your discussion public after all.

Finally, when the discussion has been completed, you can also delete the inbox.

There is a small menu in the top right corner of the website. It shows you with which eMail address you’re currently using Re:Subj and you can access your inboxes and your profile.

As you move into My Inboxes, you should notice that the top right menu link changes from My Inboxes to Create new inbox. The list of your inboxes shows when new comments or replies were added to one of them. You can also hide messages to shorten the entire list of inboxes.

The My Inboxes overview is especially handy if you decided to not receive eMail updates. This can be done in your profile. And in case you didn’t yet notice the green window asking you to associate a name with your eMail, don’t worry, that can also be edited in your Profile.

And basically, that’s it. You now know everything about Re:Subj. It’s that easy!

And the advantages should be quite obvious by now, but let me sum it up for you:

• no signup, an eMail address is sufficient
• receive eMail updates and reply through eMail
• disable eMail updates and read or reply whenever you want
• leave the “mailing list” anytime

So when everybody and their mothers has an idea or comment to a simple question, you won’t have to sit there helplessly as your inbox clogs up with silly replies. Re:Subj returns some control and you can focus on serious eMails.

What do you think? Does it sound useful to you?

Re:Subj

Image credits: spekulator

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• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Terminally Delete eMails In Thunderbird By Compacting Folders (14)
• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)

How many times have we sent an email to the wrong guy? At least – once. How many times have we forgotten to include someone in the mail? Many times over! The end result may or may not be as bad as with handguns or as embarrassing as a tequila high, but email mistakes are unprofessional (and can be potentially a huge blow).

The good thing about Gmail is that the boffins in Google Labs have their empathy hat on. They know that foot-in-the-mouth disease is becoming quite common in the online world too, thanks to rapid tools like email and Twitter. That’s why Gmail has quite a few Google Labs email features inbuilt to prevent such errors.

We have brought up some of the features previously mentioned in a couple of Google Labs feature posts. Maybe, this one will help to put all of them on a common thread. Let’s start with two of the latest ones on the experimental block.

To access the Google Labs email features, click on the little green beaker icon at the top right.

1. Don’t Forget Bob

   

   Who’s Bob? It could be your friend or your boss. But actually in Gmail it’s the new name for the old ‘Add More Recipients’. It’s Google’s way of suggesting adding guys you might have missed while filling your address fields. Click on Enable and it might help you avoid a bit of heartburn from ignored friends while emailing important announcements.

2. Got the wrong Bob?

   

   Ignoring Bob is bad. What’s even worse is including the wrong Bob. Imagine sending a gossipy email to the wrong person…it will surely ignite the office grapevine. Unlike gossip, emails don’t give you a place to hide. The new feature in Gmail Labs prompts you if it thinks you’re about to e-mail the wrong person. This feature works for group mailing. Gmail looks at the groups you mail more often and alerts you if a new name gets added. If you think you didn’t make a mistake, just ignore it and move on.

3. Mail Googles

   

   Google’s cure for temporary blood rush to the head or for the dopey eyed. Enabling this feature forces you to do some basic math before sending out the mail. Gmail makes sure that you are in the right state of mind during the odd hours when email mistakes are more common.

   After enabling it, you can manually adjust days, times and difficulty level under Settings – Generals.

4. Forgotten Attachment Detector

   

   This reminder feature is for more professional email results rather than fatal goof-ups. No one will actually mind if you forget an attachment except the HR guy perhaps. The clever feature senses that you are sending a mail with attachment (say, you wrote: “I am attaching this doc file”) and alerts you if you forget to do so.

5. Authentication icon for verified senders

   

   Falling for a scam is the ultimate email goof-up. Did you hear about the one where the FBI head honcho nearly fell for an email phishing scam? He was banned by his wife from further online transactions. The Gmail authentication icon protects you from such a fate by adding a layer of security. It scans the email headers and places a key icon next to verified emails that are super-trustworthy. The trust is limited to eBay and PayPal for now but as the official Gmail blog says, more senders will be added soon.

6. Keep your email conversations updated

   

   This is supposed to work like this – if you are in the middle of reading a mail and someone sends in a response to it before you do, Gmail alerts you that a new message has arrived. Click Update conversation to see what you’ve missed. With this feature, you won’t fall out of the loop and can stay – updated. This is not strictly a Google Labs email feature but now a default feature for all incoming mails.

7. Undo Send

   

   You have committed all the cardinal sins mentioned so far. No worries, Google has a workaround for it too. With Undo Send, you can quickly stop the email from being dispatched. The only problem is that you have to realize your mistake fast and click on the undo button faster. Undo Send gives you just 5 or 10 seconds to see the error of your ways. Ignore it and the e-mail goes through. Click Undo and you are returned to the Compose window.

Most of these are experimental Google Lab email features. They may or may not stand the test of time and use. But while they are there, they can help us keep our follies at bay.

Which feature do you like the best? Which one do you hate? Tell us your reasons in the comments below.

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• The 4 Fabulous Gmail Labs Extensions You Should Try Out (8)
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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
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It is a cool new “Relationship Manager” that recently launched publicly in beta. Gist is not for casual users, rather, it’s a one-of-its-kind service for professional users that bridges key gaps between other popular services. For personal use, you should checkout Life.IO.

What is Gist?

Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you.

Get Started By Connecting Accounts

Gist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn’t connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.

Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let’s look at the powerful views Gist offers.

Dashboard View

The Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.

You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you’ve recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links.

You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an “intelligent reader” to being a “intelligent networking” tool.

People and Companies View

The People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.

You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.

Profile View

Gist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you’re not using it.

The What’s New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term.

Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn’t have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person.

Optimize To Get The Most Out Of Gist

After initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:

• Gist may not recognize that the person from your LinkedIn network and your friend on Facebook are the same person. In these cases, you will need to Merge them.
• Similarly, Gist may not correctly associate Twitter handles with the contacts from your email inbox.
• Gmail has a rather unconventional approach of adding every email address you send email to, as a contact. To my dismay, this doesn’t work well with Gist, which imports all Gmail contacts. I ended up deleting tons of frivolous help@…, support@…, and info@… kind of “contacts”.
• You may not have had much interaction with influential people who are actually important to you. It appears that Gist’s ranking uses frequency of communication as a benchmark to assess importance, because of which you may need to manually adjust their importance.
• If your Facebook friends are primarily personal friends who work at companies that don’t really matter to you, you will need to either delete or lower their importance in Gist.
• Also, profiles may need to be edited to add individual websites, blog feeds and news sources so that you get relevant information.

Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Think of rules as traffic cops who direct and move (email) traffic and streamline the flow. Rules are specific sets of instructions that are applied to messages under a specific set of conditions. Rules are applicable for messages as well as RSS feeds.

All Outlook rules broadly are of two types – those that deal with organizing your emails by moving it around and those that notify you when some action occurs.

The best things about rules are that they can be selectively applied, applied in combination, automatically run or even run manually. Think about it, in the absence of rules, we would have had to spend considerable time sifting through the emails by hand one at a time.

One of the most often used application for rules are when you want to organize emails in Outlook and move emails to a folders automatically as they land in the inbox. The obvious benefit of shunting emails automatically is cleanliness and organization. The rule is best suited for mails which arrive frequently – like newsletters, email updates or feeds. Such mails are usually kept in ‘storage’ for later reading.

So, creating personal folders for such mails are the first thing, creating a system to automatically organize those emails into these folders is the next.

1. Setup a folder or folders for saving the emails (e.g. Job, Family, Pals, and Newsletters etc).
2. You can create a rule directly from a message. Right-click on the email you want to automatically move to the special folder. Click on Create Rule.
3. In the Create Rule box that opens up, you can select one or more conditions and the follow through actions by checking the boxes. As shown, you can screen the email by sender address (or distribution list), subject and/or recipient. You can also set a sound alert or a desktop New Item Alert for the incoming mail. To move the email to a specific folder, checkmark Move the item to folder. Click on the Select folder button to select the folder or click on New for a new one.
4. Click on OK to confirm the new rule. All emails satisfying the new rule will get moved automatically to the folder from now. If you instantly want to run the rule, check Run this rule now on messages already in the current folder.
5. Further fine-tune the rule if you want by clicking on Advanced Options. The advanced option wizard lets you select other conditions, select a range of actions to perform on them and select exceptions to the rules if any.

   The rules setup concludes at the final screen where you can specify a descriptive name for the rule, turn it on and review it for any changes.

   

   So, thought of interesting plays with the rules? Let’s see… you can move mails with attachments to another folder but with an exception that it’s within a set size range. Another good use is to assign a priority level to incoming mail so you can deal with the more important ones first and leave the rest for later.

Alternatively, instead of selecting a single message to start a new rule, you can also start create a rule from scratch using the wizard by opening it from Tools – Rules and Alerts – New Rule.

In Step 1: Select a template. Under the entries of Stay organized,  select Move messages from someone to a folder.

In Step 2: Edit the rule description – click on the underlined link for people or distribution list to set the From address filter. Next, click on the specified folder link to set the target folder.

The next sequences of steps are the same as in the Advanced Options wizard.

Many interesting automatic actions can be performed on your emails with a combination of different rules. Remember, rules are performed in sequence as shown in the Rules and Alerts box. Rules can always be edited at any step and also their order changed.

Instant tips?

For speedier processing, combine some of your rules with common actions and organize the order in which they are to be triggered. For special cases, you can set the Stop Processing action after a specific rule has run.

Rules are a faster way to better manage your emails and keep some aspects of your inbox on auto-pilot. Outlook 2007 rules are a flexible way to free up a lot of email management chores. Do you use rules to as productivity boosters? What are some of the unique cases you apply them on?

Learn more by watching the Microsoft How-to video here.

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• 10 Powerful Productivity Tips & Tricks For The Outlook 2007 (18)
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These messages can be customized. You can for instance add the RSS feed of your favorite blog or news site or add favorite quotes or other wisdom. For more information on what RSS feeds are see this article.

It could become a bit of a distraction, but I think it’s a nice variation for your inbox. For people who practically live inside their Gmail inbox, this is nice and it could even make you smarter by displaying trivia (or look smarter if you memorize the quotes).

They work like a mini one line RSS reader. You can click the link to read the article. You’ll see from what source the link is and how long ago it was published. Click the arrows < and > to browse through the different sources and links. Customizing is easy:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page, and open the Web Clips tab.
3. Browse popular clips by selecting a topic link along the left. Search for feeds by entering topics that interest you – use this feature like you would Google Search. Or, enter specific feed URLs.
4. Click Add next to the clips you’d like to see in Gmail.

You can add specific feed URLs by entering them in the search box on the left. The feed URL of MakeUseOf is for instance http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Makeuseof. Which you can copy and paste into the search field and your favorite tech tips will scroll by in your inbox. Another interesting one is the feed of our Geeky Fun collection: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/GeekyFun. Gmail web clips add these to a list.

From this list random items are chosen to display, together with some of the advertising that is already there. You’ll see the list under “My Clips“. You’re not stuck with the web clips Google has already chosen for you. If you’re not that much interested in cooking or one of the others, simply click remove on the right. Having a small list makes every source come up more often.

Some other cool ones are quotes or trivia such as TIME.com quote of the day,  Quotes4all, TriviaTidbit and Funny Quote of the Day (right-click and choose “copy link“). Enter a word you are interested in in the search box and see what they have.

Of course you already know about the themes that Gmail has enabled to further customize your inbox. After rocking Terminal for a couple of days myself I have been using Ninjas to my full satisfaction.

For some more very convenient little Gmail tips you might not know about, see this article on MakeUseOf and everything else on Gmail. And of course let us know if you have found some cool web clips that are not in the suggested lists yet.

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account (31)
• Gmail Tips: Four Degrees Towards Becoming A Gmail Ninja (5)

Now, we’re rounding out the last few loose ends: figuring out how to integrate the rest of your multi-tasking into your Gmail window, and finally, how to maintain your system.

5. Filling The Sidebar

The sidebar is a really great place to keep information handy. If you use Remember The Milk, Toodledo, or any other to-do list that has an iGoogle gadget, you can use the “Add Gadget By URL” option that we enabled earlier in Labs. You can find this option under the Gadget tab in Settings. Also, if you like to keep a calculator, weather, stocks, or anything else to reference on hand, iGoogle has an extensive gallery of gadgets here.

If there are emails that you are always looking for or searches you are always running, Quick Links is a great feature to have. All you need to do is navigate to that email or complete that search, and click “Add Quick Link” in the Quick Links box. Then enter the title of the page view, and you’re done!

This feature is great also, for keeping projects you are working on, on hand. I frequently email myself research, and correspond with my bosses about work, and if the emails are directly related to a project I’m working on, I add a quick link to it so I don’t have to keep digging for the same emails to reference information I need for my project.

If you find yourself putting the search for emails tagged with a certain label into this box, you might think about going back to #3 of Part 1’s post: Setting Up Labels. However, if your intention is to leave your sidebar as uncluttered as possible, then you can enable the “Go To Label” feature in Labs. Then, simply by typing “g”, then “l”, you can type in the label you need to access to quickly run a search for that label.

Your daily agenda for Google Calendar should already be on your sidebar, since we activated it in Labs earlier. If you are part of the crowd that doesn’t use Google Calendar, hopefully you use something that syncs with Google Calendar. Then, you can read up on how to sync GCal with Outlook or iCal.

6. Multiple Inboxes

Multiple Inboxes is a critical feature for this system, since you will need to keep the emails tagged Gmail/Action and Gmail/Hold on hand for easy reference. Since we enabled the Multiple Inboxes feature in Labs earlier, there should now be a Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings. There, you simply enter a search query to determine what you’ll see in each of your inboxes, and name it appropriately.

If you’re not familiar with Gmail’s Search function (which is highly unlikely), I’ll give you a quick rundown of a very important feature: specifying the type of keyword you are typing. For example, if you are looking for all of the emails that are addressed to a certain email (for example, if you incorporated another mail provider into Gmail), you can search for all emails sent to your other address. With the HAS: query, you can even specify what type of attachment the email you are searching for has.

There is an extended list of Gmail’s queries here.

Gmail’s search is definitely a very robust and powerful tool, so learn it to your own advantage. I swear, it will be of use some day.

Now that you have everything set up, you need a good system to manage your email inflow. First, look at the unread emails in your inbox. Are there any that you want to delete off the bat? If you answer YES for a certain newsletter or sender’s email consistently, you should consider asking that sender to stop emailing you. Regardless of what your packrat instincts tell you, you most likely will NOT need that email for reference in the future.

Now, starting from the first unread email, scan it quickly and determine if its something that needs to be taken care of right away. Following the GTD principle of filing tasks, if it is an email that can be taken care of in less than two minutes, do it. Otherwise, label it for the appropriate category and, depending on whether you can take care of it with the resources you have on hand, or need to wait for someone or something else before you can take action, file the email into the Gmail/Action or the Gmail/Hold label.

If an email references a task you need to do, type it into your to-do list, which should be right next to you, in the sidebar. If it references an event or meeting you’ll need to attend, add an event into your GCal gadget. Conversation strings that you are holding, which you have already responded to, should go into your Gmail/Hold label, since you are holding the email for the time when the sendee responds.

From now on, make sure you sort or delete each and every unread email that arrives. The main idea is to keep as few emails in your inbox as humanly possible, and file your emails in the category(s) most appropriate for it, by tagging each email with the relevant labels. Then, go through your Action inbox at least once a day, and complete/respond to everything that you have time for at that moment. Don’t forget to go back later, and eliminate everything else! By taking this type of dedicated approach to pruning your incoming email, you can make sure that you’re staying on top of the things you need to do.

So hopefully, throughout this series, I’ve given you a few useful tips for maintaining your email, and inspired you to perhaps take control of your inbox. If this article didn’t quite tickle your fancy or spark your imagination, there’s plenty of other literature out there to provoke your interest. Perhaps within the pages of MakeUseOf, you’ll find the key you’ve been looking for to organize your life. Good luck!

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part 1) (19)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• How To Customize Your GMail Inbox with Gmail Web Clips (4)

As I continue to use it, I continue to be piqued by its rich suite of features. Yes, it may be too much of an overkill for most and it has its share of knockers, but there’s no denying the fact that tuned right, it’s a very serious productivity tool.

Today’s email programs are pushing the point that our day to day lives revolves around communication. Sharing emails, appointments or tweets with others or simply keeping ourselves on track with to-do lists and feeds. The email program is already the nerve center of most of our activities.  If your day starts with a click on the Outlook 2007 icon and ends with it, then these tips and tricks could help to keep you clicking all the more.

Be quick and reuse with Quick Parts

Quick Parts is a feature that’s found in Outlook 2007 and MS Word. Consider it Auto Text in a new avatar. If you use blocks of text, links or images repeatedly in your emails, then Quick Parts can save you a lot of typing. Here’s how…

• Open a new email window.
• Type in or insert the commonly used content.
• Select the content and click on the Insert tab.  Select Quick Parts from the Text tab of the Insert ribbon.



• The content gets saved as a new building block. You can give it a new descriptive name and put it in a category.



• Use the block of content in any new email by clicking on Insert – Quick Parts. A small preview window opens up for you to choose between the saved quick parts.

Explore this feature further…it’s a timesaver.

Be quick to the draw with Ribbon shortcuts

Are you quick with the mouse or the keys? Either way, it pays to know keyboard shortcuts. With habit we get to be faster with it. The Office suite has found a nifty way to use keyboard shortcuts minus the mugging up. Try it out by opening a new mail window.

• Press the Alt key to see the Key Tip bubbles appear for each tab.

• Press the key for any tab to switch to that tab. For instance, press N for the Insert tab. A press of the Alt again and you get the key tip bubbles for all the commands in the tab. For instance, pressing P in the Insert tab will open up Pictures. A few days and a few uses later, you can ditch your mouse.

• Hang a Do-Not-Disturb on Outlook by disabling new message alerts. Constant new mail notifications are a productivity killer. So, it’s always better to disable it if you so choose.

• Go to Tools – Options – Email Options – Advanced Email Options.

• Uncheck the options as shown in the screenshot below:

Click OK and you will be left in peace.

Attach and send in one smooth flow

Most of us usually take the Attach File route to send attachments using Outlook. The quicker way to send attachments is the simple copy-paste routine.

• Open Outlook in your Inbox.
• Copy one or more documents from the source folder.
• Drop it in the Inbox view. A new mail opens with your documents attached. A single attachment will have the file’s name in the subject field while multiple attachments will have the subject line bank.

• All you need to do is complete the other details and send it across.

Peek into your attachments before you save or open

The feature to preview attachments within Outlook itself saves lots of time as unlike in earlier editions, one doesn’t have to open them separately. A quick peek and you can decide if you want to save it or ditch it. Note that this will work only for  applications which have previewers installed (it doesn’t work for PDF files).

By default, MS Office previewers (includes image previewer) are installed. The XPS Essentials Pack (for XPS files) for Windows Vista and Windows XP has to be downloaded separately.

Preview is as simple as right clicking on the attachment and selecting Preview. After previewing the file, you can choose to save it.

Find the needle in the haystack with Instant Search and Advanced Search

MS Outlook 2007 offers two different ways to search for emails, documents and files.

Instant Search as the name suggests, starts matching the searched item with the search term as you begin typing. Within each item, the search term gets highlighted in yellow. You can configure a few search options by clicking the solid downward arrow. You can fine tune your search by using the Query Builder. Instant Search is a part of Windows Desktop search which indexes all content in the computer.

Advanced Find is really for that very tiny needle in the haystack. Bring up Advanced Find by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + F. You have a lot of options you can use in the three tabs of the box. A combination of a few criteria leads to pinpointed and quick results.

Avoid the earlier point by marking special emails by color

Important emails from important senders should stand out from the chaos that’s usually our Inbox. The easiest way is to of course put them in a separate category. The second easiest visually striking way is to mark them by color.

Select a message from the important contact. From the menu, click on Tools – Organize. This opens a section on top.

Choose the second option – Using Colors. Select your preferred color and click on Apply Color. You can also pick a color for Show messages sent only to me as a way to mark out messages that’s only for you and not a group mail. Further, you can click on Automatic Formatting to apply more rules and to use a different font.

Click the close button [X] after you are done.

Give your old emails a new name

We all have ‘threads’ of email conversations in our inbox. Mails which started out with a ‘Hi’ in the subject field and after a few exchanges started discussing something important like a new salary breakdown. The content has shifted but the starter subject line does nothing for us. Changing the subject line to reflect the content is a best practice especially when you have hundreds of mails archived in Outlook. Changing the subject line is fortunately as easy as the first time.

Open the email with the subject line in need of change in a new window.

Place the cursor on the subject line and type in your new appropriate subject. Confirm and close.

Find Tweeter a place in Outlook

Some say that emails are old hat. It’s all Twitter now. I disagree but we have to give those little messages a corner too because it’s a lingo we are speaking now. TwInbox is a little 460KB sized plug-in which integrates with Outlook 2003 and 2007 as a Twitter toolbar.

It connects to your Twitter account and lets you preview and bring all your messages into a folder. Just like a lot of Twitter tools, it lets you do basically everything you would do on a Twitter page. TwInbox also shortens long URLs via TinyURL. The developer site seems to be down, but you can download a copy from here.

Google Feeds into Outlook

Linking RSS feeds from Google Reader into Outlook 2007 (or 2003) is a three step process.

Right click on the RSS feeds folder in Outlook and click on Properties.

Click on the Home Page tab. Check Show home page by default for this folder.

Copy paste the Google reader URL – http://google.com/reader

Click on Apply and OK to close.

Outlook 2007 is a large software in itself. These ten tips are probably just a tip of the iceberg. But hopefully they have served to illustrate the better features of a respectable email client.

What are your pet tips and tricks? Which ones do you call your productivity boosters? Or which ones you wish Outlook had? Let us know in a line or two.

Image Credit: Daniel F. Pigatto

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• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• MS Outlook Tip: How to Automatically Organize Incoming Emails (11)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook (26)

We move onto Part Two. Now that we’ve set up our labels, we need to do something with them. We’ll set up the filters in this part with some Gmail filter tips, so that labeling email isn’t as painful, and is mostly automated. I find that maintaining is the hardest part of organization, so if there a bit of automated help involved, hopefully that will motivate you to keep up the hard work of sorting through your communication.

Gmail Filter Tips

Having labels set up is excellent, but that doesn’t accomplish anything in itself, unless you plan on applying labels by hand to every email you receive. However, that would make this system tedious and redundant. That’s why we’ll use filters to automate email labeling.

Click on the Settings link in the upper right hand corner of your screen. In the page that pops up, click the Filters header, and you should be greeted by a list of the filters you currently have. Click Create New Filter.

You don’t need to fill out all of the boxes; it actually is best if you fill out as few of them as necessary, as the more boxes you fill out, the more likely you are to miss emails that should fall under that filter. On the contrary, the less boxes you fill out, the more likely you are to accidentally capture unrelated emails. Thus, it goes without saying that you should only be using very specific key words to set up your filters.

For example, my school job sends out mass emails to their mailing list by addressing all mass emails to “stc-all.” Thus, I created a filter for all the emails that were directed TO: stc-all.  If you have more than one keyword for a particular box, you can use AND or OR to append that keyword to the filter as well. In my above example, I could put TO: stc-all AND ucla.edu, and that would filter out emails that are only to both stc-all and ucla.edu. If I had put OR instead of AND, then the filter would single out all of the emails directed to either stc-all or ucla.edu (which, in this case, would be inadvisable, since all of the emails directed to any ucla.edu address would not necessarily be related to my job. Keep in mind though, the separate boxes represent parameters that are added onto your search. If you typed something in both TO: and FROM:, for example, your filter would only catch emails that are directed both TO: keyword 1, and FROM: keyword 2.

From here, you can do a test search to see which emails your filter catches and if the keywords you are using blanket enough of the right emails. Then, if necessary, you can adjust your keywords if they do not filter out the necessary emails. Otherwise, you can move forward and specify what you would like to name your filter and do with the emails.

If you’re applying the “Skip the Inbox” option to any of your emails, you might want to consider unsubscribing from the newsletter or asking the sender to desist. The “Mark As Read” function is great for any emails that you need to check, but don’t want necessarily cluttering your inbox. For example, I use Freecycle, and want to see all the emails sent by its members, but if left alone, I would get ten or twenty some emails from Freecycle every day. Of course, leaving it as is doesn’t impact my workflow too much, but I prefer setting them all as “read” by default so that when I’m done sorting my important emails, I can select “Select: All Read” to quickly clear out my inbox.

We’re almost done! There’s only one part to go before we hit the final bend, and learn how to keep our inboxes tidy and efficient, so we’re not swamped by the influx of emails. Take some time before the next article comes out to play around with your labels and filters, and figure out a system that works for you. Perhaps you’ll only utilize some of the tips that I gave you, and that is definitely fine.

As always, whatever works for you is always the best path to take.

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part 1) (19)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• How To Customize Your GMail Inbox with Gmail Web Clips (4)

At first, I couldn’t stand Google Mail (aka GMail) because of the way emails are organized, the format and layout of the email account and other minor details related to personal preference. However, after a while these little idiosyncracies started to grow on me, and after a while I found that I preferred Google mail over Yahoo.

The biggest clincher for me is that Google gives you POP3 or IMAP access for free, while Yahoo makes you pay for the Premium upgrade. Unfortunately, I have this long-standing Yahoo email account with thousands of archived documents, images and conversations going back for almost a decade – so I continue using my Yahoo email account.

To make matters even more interesting, I stuck with Yahoo Email Classic to keep things simple while Yahoo worked through their Beta upgrade, and I’ve never switched.  I’ve always been a Yahoo fan, as evidenced by my recent article on the Yahoo Go mobile email software, and of course the article on Yahoo Calendar.  When it comes to Yahoo email, there are certain things I like about the Classic format, and if you’re a fellow Yahoo Classic mail user, I’ve found a few tips and tricks that can help to streamline and simplify the Yahoo email experience.

Organizing Your Email

The first and most important way to optimize and streamline your email is to group up emails in a way that makes sense to you. If that means organizing emails by topic, then do so. If it’s easier for you to throw all emails from each of your clients into a separate folder, then that’s what you should do. Using email folders is a good way for you to customize your email experience and keep your main email folder cleaned up.

In Yahoo Mail, it really couldn’t be much simpler. In the left navbar, you’ll see a section titled “My Folders” which is probably empty. Next to it you’ll see the “[Add - Edit]” link. Click the “Add” link and a pop-up box lets you type the name of your new folder, and that’s all there is to it.  This is an easy way to just create a folder for every potential category where you often get many emails. The next step is to move those particular emails into your folders.

Just select the emails that you want to move to a folder, and then click the “Move…” dropdown button at the top of your email listings. You’ll discover that every folder you’ve created shows up on the list. Just select the directory you want to move those emails to, and your inbox just got a little bit more clean.

Streamlining New Incoming Email

So you’ve created nice folders and you’ve nicely cleaned out your inbox after years of letting it get all built up and cluttered, but how do you keep it clean? Just like when you pick up the house after the kids make a mess, the very next day you know they’re going to do the same thing all over again. When folks send you new mail, it’s going to plop right back into your nice empty inbox. You could always work your tail off moving and organizing all new emails into their respective folders – but why do that when you can automate the process using email filters? You can access Yahoo’s email filtering system using the options button at the upper right corner of your email listings.

Just click on “Mail Options” and you’ll find that Yahoo email is a whole lot more customizable than you probably thought.

As you can see, you can automatically insert a signature into all of your emails, manage spam email (Yahoo email is configured to do this for you by default, but you can “tweak” the settings if you want), or configure a vacation auto-response. Pop & Forwarding is for Premium only. The option we’re interested in at the moment is the “Filters” link, so go ahead and click on it.

InYahoo Mail Classic, the view for filters looks like the old format, but the premise is the same. You’re allowed up to 100 filters which, for my purposes, is far more than enough. Creating a filter involves filling out the three sections above – the filter name (make it something obvious), creating the rule for the filter and then which folder to move the emails to if the incoming email matches the description.

The rules are pretty simple – you can filter incoming emails based on words or phrases within the header, To and CC fields, the subject or even text within the body of the email itself.  Yes, you can also forward select emails to your mobile device by clicking the little box at the bottom.

Little Known Features of Yahoo Mail

There’s no doubt that Yahoo Mail is not an email account that you’ll be writing home about. However, there are a few little features that at least add a little bit of flexibility to your emailing experience while you’re there. The first feature is the ability to extract either all of the attachments or all of the images that are attached to any of your existing emails.

You can use this feature by clicking either “My Photos” or “My Attachments” in the “Search Shortcuts” box on the left navbar. When you click “My Attachments” for example, you’ll find search results of every single attachment you’ve ever received.  These are sorted into file types, as shown here.

This is extremely useful for when you know you’ve received a file from someone, but you just can’t find it. By being able to bypass the emails and just search by attachment or photo, you can quickly find the file that you’re looking for.

Composing emails in Yahoo isn’t anything to cheer about either, but there are a few little features that are worth mentioning. You can add a background template to your emails – either solid color, or one of those horribly annoying “picture” backgrounds. Throughout your email, you can embed HTML links just like a regular online editor (like WordPress), and you can also highlight a word using a variety of highlight colors – useful for when you’re editing someone’s writing or otherwise want to point out a section of text.

Finally, while Yahoo doesn’t allow you to connect to your Yahoo email account through POP, apparently it’s OK for you to add other email accounts to your Yahoo webmail account. While this is certainly an effective way to block users from using other webmail accounts to read Yahoo email, it’s also a great way to frustrate users enough so that they decide to opt to avoid using Yahoo entirely. I suspect (and hope) that Yahoo may change this particular free limitation in due course.  Next time, I’ll switch over the “All New Mail” view and describe how Yahoo’s new layout is both better and worse than the Yahoo Mail Classic version.

Do you like Yahoo email, or do you avoid it like the plague? Do you know of any useful features within the free webmail system? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• 10 Powerful Productivity Tips & Tricks For The Outlook 2007 (18)
• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• Re:Subj – An Easy Temporary Inbox for Group Discussions (9)

In the following tips, I will show you a couple methods to streamline your email browsing, organize emails in Gmail and turn Gmail into a multitasking machine. Mind you, my method of organization takes a whole lot of setting up, and a bit of getting used to, but considering how much more integrated your email will be with your life, the time spent will be worth it.

First Things First

The first and most important aspect of revamping your inbox is stopping the inflow of junk. Start by unsubscribing from any newsletters that you do not read on a daily basis, and filter out the stubborn ones (for which you can’t find an unsubscribe link) for automatic deletion (I’ll cover this more in Part 2). Then, you can start clearing out your inbox.

If you have a pile of unread messages that you never plan on reading, Gmail’s search has a useful function that can isolate all of your unread messages. Simply go up to the search box and type in ” is:unread ” and click Search Mail, and you should be seeing all of your unread emails.  Then, you can either delete all of them, or then selectively isolate each sender and deal with the associated emails you see fit.

Before we start configuring your revamped inbox, you’ll need the Better Gmail 2 Extension written by Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker.

1. Better Gmail 2 Configuration

This is how I set up my Better Gmail 2 options. Of course, yours may not be exactly the same as mine, but this setup works with the rest of my configuration just fine. I have “Support This Add On via Amazon” enabled because it helps donate a bit of money to keep this app in development each time you make a purchase on Amazon. Make sure you have Hide Labels in Message Row checked, unless you like to see your labels before the subject line of every single email. It’s very important to have Folders4Gmail checked, as you will see in point 3.

Now, we will go over Gmail Labs settings, which is the tiny green beaker that should be to the left of your Settings link in the upper right corner of your Gmail page. In Labs, make sure you enable Quick Links, the Mark as Read Button, Multiple Inboxes, Search Autocomplete, Google Calendar Gadget, and Add Any Gadget by URL. I will cover what you will do with each of these later.

2. Consolidating Your Email

An important part about streamlining your email process is making sure all of your emails come through a single  stream. For some, that means using Thunderbird or Outlook, and for this particular writer, it means channeling all of my email into Gmail. Jack Cola wrote a great article about importing mail from Hotmail here, and you can find directions for importing from Yahoo (the procedure for other services is the same) here, although right now it seems as if YMMV with Gmail’s Import Emails function.

Now that you have all of your internet accounts set up to import to Gmail, it’s time to set Gmail as your default mailto: handler. Tina wrote a very useful tip in her article, Make Gmail Your Default Desktop Client, to set mailto: links to open with Gmail in Firefox. Go to >Tools >Options >Applications tab and type >mailto into the >Search field. Do NOT hit enter, the matching selection will appear automatically. You can select an action for mailto links in the >Action drop-down menu. You can set it to open Gmail.”

3.  Setting Up Labels

First of all, make sure that Folders4Gmail is checked in Better Gmail 2. This allows you to use the ‘ / ‘ symbol to denote nested labels in Gmail. I use a modified GTD approach to my labeling: I have a [Gmail]/Action label and a [Gmail]/Hold label that I assign to emails that I need to respond to or enter into my schedule, and emails that I am waiting for a response on, respectively.

Then, you could either go further into GTD and set up context subfolders for your Action label, or you can do what I do and leave the rest of your labels as categories that your emails may pertain to (I have Financial Aid, Classes, etc).

Now, what you can do is go into the Labels tab under Settings, and there, you’ll be able to set up which labels you want to be displayed on the sidebar. If you feel hesitant to disable anything on the off chance you may want to access All Mail or Starred messages, again, have no fear! This is where the Auto Complete feature we turned on earlier comes in. Type “Starred” into the Search box, and you should see a drop down list that includes the entry “is: Starred.” If you search for that, you’ll see all of your starred messages. You can do this with any of the other system labels.

Now you’ve learned a bit about how I configure my Gmail to multitask. We learned a bit about labels, Lab features, using Firefox extensions in conjunction with Gmail, and importing email from other services into Gmail. In Part 2, I’ll cover a bit more about labels, but in relation to setting up filters for specific labels. I’ll also be talking about setting up your sidebar with your favorite To Do list manager, Quick Links, and Google Calendar, and using Multiple Inboxes to keep track of what you’ll need to respond to.

How do you keep track of your inbox influx? Any tips of your own to help other readers organize all their emails? Let us know in the comments!

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• How To: Stay Connected With Gmail (13)

For instance, I need to send forth an email to a different time zone at 6 AM in the morning. The tireless way would be to wake with the birds and send it on the clock at 6 AM. The job’s done…but the smarter way would be to compose it the night before and schedule it for email delivery at 6 AM. The job’s done without me losing any sleep over it.

So why lose sleep when an email client like Outlook comes with a schedule delivery feature built right in. And till the day Gmail comes out with it, the desktop Outlook is the way to go.

The option was there in the earlier editions of Outlook too. A few simple settings and it makes Outlook work at the right time.

Let’s see how to set it up with Microsoft Outlook 2007.

• Start with a new email message.
• On the Message tab, click on the tiny Message Options arrow which gives out the Message Options dialog box.



• You can also access this dialog from the Options tab – More Options – Delay Delivery.



• Under Delivery Option, select and mark the box which says Do not deliver before. Click on the Calendar and Time dropdowns to select the exact day and time when you want the email to be delivered. Click on Close.



• When you click on Send, the message remains in the outbox till the time scheduled by you for emailing it. Of course, Outlook must remain open till that time.

There is no limit to the number of emails you can setup for scheduled delivery.

Unfortunately, there is no simple way to setup a recurring scheduled email. It would have been really handy for nagging you-owe-me emails to a thrifty friend. That’s a bit of a miss as it’s not possible to set up Microsoft Outlook to schedule recurring events like appointments and tasks. The recourse for recurring scheduled email is only through third party add-ins. I haven’t come across a freeware add-in so far, so my hunt is still on.

Read the official Microsoft Online page here.

The scheduling of my emails lets me fire and forget. It is a little used but invaluable tool for productivity. That is, if you don’t want to wake up at ungodly hours. Do you use this tool regularly, sporadically or not at all? Let us know the worth of this optional setup.

Image Credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

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• How To Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook (26)
• MS Outlook Tip: How to Automatically Organize Incoming Emails (11)
• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
• How to Restart or Shut Down Your Computer Remotely using Microsoft Outlook (12)
• How to Email Smarter With Buit-In Time Zone Converters (8)

Email can be a huge time-drain, particularly for those of us who get a lot of it – it can be overwhelming, difficult to deal with, and a huge pain in the you-know-what. Or, with the help of a few tips, tricks, and applications, it can be a productivity powerhouse.

Gmail seems to be the cool kid on the block, and it’s one of the best free email services that’s taking over a huge portion of the email market. So, in an effort to help this rapidly-growing crowd, here are seven tips, tricks, and tools for making Gmail into a productive, getting things done machine:

1. Use Quick Links

Quick Links, a little white box that lives in the sidebar of Gmail, can be hugely useful once you figure out how to use it. All it does is store links – these links can be to just about anything.

If you’re always referencing a particular page when you write emails, or always copy and paste a particular Web address, don’t put it in your bookmarks, put it in Gmail’s Quick Links; that way, it’s available to you anywhere Gmail is – which is pretty much everywhere.

The sky’s the limit with these links – I have a particular email I send often (resume attached, cover letter in body) set up in my links, and can open it, edit it, and send it with only a few seconds.

2. Use Tasks

Tasks just became a fully-fledged feature of Gmail, and with good reason – it’s a super-lightweight, simple way to manage the things you need to do, and it lives right within Gmail itself.

With Tasks, you can add an email right to the list, and get it out of your inbox. You can create subtasks, due dates, multiple lists, and more, all from within the Gmail window.

3. Use Your Own Task-Manager

Maybe you’ve already got a system you use for tasks, like Remember the Milk, or Todoist. Because so many people consider it to be the best free email service, more and more of these applications have ways of integrating with Gmail, whether by an extension for Firefox or a gadget within the Gmail sidebar (here are RTM’s and Todoist’s). A quick search with Google, or through your task manager’s site should find exactly what you’re looking for.

4. Make Gmail Better

There are three or four reasons I can’t stop using Firefox, and they’re all extensions. Number one on the list, by a country mile, is Better Gmail. This extension adds tons of useful things to Gmail that really ought to be there anyway – showing the number of unread emails first in the title (or even in the icon), automatically showing message details, creating hierarchy among your labels (they’re more like folders this way), and much, much more. It makes Gmail much more smooth and functional, not to mention more productive.

5. Close Gmail More Often

It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of keeping your Gmail window open all the time, constantly checking and checking to see if you have a new email. I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and I know how much of a waste of time that can really be.

Instead of playing that futile game, try downloading a notifier that tells you when you’ve got new emails, so you’re only checking Gmail when you actually need to. There’s one for Firefox called Gmail Notifier, one for the Mac Desktop called Gmail Notifier, and one for Windows called Gmail Notifier. They’re not clever namers, these developers, but they do good work.

6. Send it all to Gmail

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I click on an “email me” link, and then my computer tries to open Outlook Express, or Outlook, or Entourage to send the email – none of which I’ve ever used, so I have to exit out of three different setup windows just to get to where I wanted originally, which is Gmail.

Thankfully, there’s a solution in Firefox. Go to “Preferences,” and then click the “Applications” Tab. There, find “mailto” under “Content Type.” Using the dropdown, select “Use Gmail.” From then on, anytime you click on a linked email address, or something that says “Send me an email!” it’ll open directly within Gmail. (This works with Yahoo Mail too.)

7. Use Talk Productively

Everyone says IM clients are a waste of time and energy, and are just a huge distraction. I say nay! Google Talk, if used right, can actually be really helpful. First, try adding IMified as a friend – you’ll be able to add tasks, calendar events, send updates on Twitter, and more.

Or, try Ping.fm, which is a social networking powerhouse – you can update almost any network you can think of right from within Talk, once you’ve set up your account with Ping.fm. If you’ve got questions, you can ask and answer questions with real people over IM, thanks to Aardvark.

How do you turn Gmail from a time-sink into a lean, mean productive machine? Would you call it best free email service out there? Share your thoughts in comments.

Image Credit: KatieKrueger

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• MS Outlook Tip: How to Automatically Organize Incoming Emails (11)

My default mail client is Gmail for online access and Thunderbird for offline. In this demonstration, I am going to use Mozilla Thunderbird, but the same principle can be used for other desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail.

Step 1: Download Install ThunderBird

To download Mozilla Thunderbird, just visit the Thunderbird Home Page and download the latest version for your operating system.

Step 2: Create your Gmail Account in Thunderbird

Once you have successfully installed Thunderbird, it is time to set up Gmail. When you first launch the ThunderBird after installing it, the below dialog box will appear. If you want to set up more accounts later, you can access it by going Tools –> Account Settings –> Add Account.

Click on the Google Mail or Gmail radio button and click Next. Then enter your name and Google email address. What you type in as Your Name field will appear as the sender when you send emails to other people.

Click Next, and do not click Download Emails now. We’ll download our emails later after we have checked the settings and set up our folders and filters. The setup should be now complete. In order to make sure the settings are correct and to alter the settings if we need, go to Tools –> Account Options. Under your email account, click on Server Settings and make sure you tick the box Leave Messages on Server. This allows you to check all of your emails online as well as offline after you have downloaded them. If you want, you can click the “Until I Delete Them” box.

Step 3: Managing Identities

Since we are in Account Settings, we can set up and manage our identities. Identities are a way we can send mail from other accounts. On the main Account Settings page, you’ll see a button that says Manage Identities. Click on that, and set up your identities for the accounts you are forwarding.

Then click on Add to add a new identity and to fill in the details of your other email accounts. You can change the settings in “Copies and Folders” so your sent mail is stored in another folder if you want.

Step 4: Create folders to sort your mail

Since mail from different email accounts are coming to this one account, we will first set up folders so we can sort mail so we know which email account we will send the email from. To do this, right click on your account and click New folder.

Create folders for all your email accounts that you are forwarding to this Gmail account.

Step 5: Automatically filter your mail from different accounts

Now we have to set up Mail Filters to sort our mail into correct folders. To access message filters, go to Tools –> Message Filters. You have to create a new filter for every email account you are forwarding that you want to go into its own separate folder. Click on the New button and give the filter an appropriate name. Select To from the first drop down box, Contains from the second and type the email address in the third. In the bottom half, select Move Message To and select the folder that you want to move the emails too.

Magnified view

Repeat the steps for every email account. Message Filters are great if you get a lot of mail from one address for example MySpace and Facebook, you can set message filters to your move all mail from those sites to different folders. The below screenshot is how I effectively sort all my MySpace and FaceBook messages into one folder.

Step 6: You are now done

By reading the Part 1, you should now be able to access your emails online in one simple location. By reading this part, you should now be able to access your emails offline. Combined these posts together and you will now be able to successfully managed your mail more efficiently and effectively. However, I do suggest that you check your other email accounts just in case there are some important emails filtered as Spam and that everything is still working correctly.

There are other ways to do this, but this is what I have been doing and it works great with my mail. Especially if you change your email addresses a lot. What do you think? Has this helped you to manage your email more efficiently?

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• 3 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft Outlook (19)
• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
• How to Email Smarter With Buit-In Time Zone Converters (8)
• MUO Polls: Do You Check Email Online or Use A Desktop Client? (37)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)

What I first did, was to download Mozilla Thunderbird. I set up of all my Hotmail and Gmail accounts and it worked very well. But if I was away from my desktop computer for a while, I found I was going back to my old ways. Thankfully, Gmail had a solution.

To simplify the whole process, the answer was to make one of my Gmail accounts my main email account. Then, forward all my emails, including those in my Hotmail email account, to that Gmail account. This way I would be able to access hotmail email from Gmail. However, this is not a simple as opening Hotmail, go to options and click forward. The problem is, Hotmail only allows you to forward emails to the following domains: hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or a Windows Live Custom Domain.

Below, I am going to show you how to download Hotmail emails to Gmail.

What you have to do then is go to Gmail –> Settings–> Accounts and there will be an option that allows you to download mail from other accounts.

Type your email address, and then click next. You will then be prompted to enter your username, password, select your POP server and choose some other options for your mail settings in Gmail.

Use these settings to add a Hotmail email account:

• POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
• User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
• Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live

Once you are done, click on Add Account. If you want to send email from the account you just added, make sure you click ‘Yes. I want to be able to send mail as…”. This allows you select an email address from a drop-down box.

So now, all email received from your other email accounts will be downloaded to your Gmail Account. This allows you to access all your emails in one easy location.

If you only have one Gmail Account and a lot of Hotmail accounts, I’d suggest to forward all your Hotmail account mail to one Hotmail Account as this forward is done almost instantly. The other advantage is if you have a lot of mail, downloading your mail to Gmail will be much quicker as it only has to connect to one account.

So now we have solved the problem of accessing all your mail in one location. But how do we now access these emails offline? If all our emails are being forwarded to one account, how do we split them up? I’ll cover this in my next post. Watch out for it.

Want to learn to be a Gmail ninja and have all the skills necessary to manage your emails? Check out other MakeUseOf posts on Gmail.

What do you use to aggregate your emails to one location? Any alternative ways to access Hotmail emails from Gmail. Do you use a web app that you can trust to access your email accounts or do you prefer a “hack” like this? Let us know in the comments!

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Customize Your GMail Inbox with Gmail Web Clips (4)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• Gmail Tips: Four Degrees Towards Becoming A Gmail Ninja (5)

This was one of the reasons why I procrastinated so much – I am not much of a technical whiz and I was nervous that I would well and truly cack it up.  Then I would have to go through the embarrassment of asking someone to look at my mess and clean up after me.    Meanwhile, all my incoming emails would be disappearing into a black hole never to be seen again.

But it turned out to be a cinch.   I had the whole thing up and running in 30 minutes and the emails flowed in without a hitch (after being briefly slow at the beginning – but I put that down to the email servers being transferred over and my new Google Apps account being processed.  After a while, email service went back to the normal speed).

In case you have ever wanted to move over to Google Apps but you’ve been nervous about the set-up, I would like to help you end your apprehension and get you started.  Kudos to Google for making it so easy.

Fill Out The Online Application

If you are a family, private user or non-profit organisation, Google Apps is free to use (businesses can have a trial period and then $50 per year per person).   But for me and probably for most of you, the free “standard edition” is the one to go for.   Go here and fill out the application.

The first step of the application is to enter your domain name (or you can buy a new domain name though Google which automatically sets everything up for you).   You also need to verify that you own the domain or if you are a member of the domain.

Then click “get started” and a standard application form pops up.   Fill it out.

Assuming all of the information is acceptable to Google and you are authorized to set the domain up on Google Apps, you will then be taken to your new dashboard.

The first thing to do is activate your email. You need to specify whether you like the URL Google automatically makes for you. So for example it may have made :

http://mail.googleapps.yourdomain.com

But if you don’t like that URL, you can easily change it to something secret such as :

http://mysecretmailbox.yourdomain.com

Now to activate the email.   Go to the email settings page and there are two options – “create user accounts” and “change MX records”.   OK, no need to get nervous.   Let’s do them one at a time :

Create user accounts

You may have a lot of email addresses for your domain such as info, contact, your name, webmaster and so on.   You need to now input all those email addresses into Google Apps.    Or if you don’t feel like typing them all in, you can upload an Excel CSV file with the addresses already in it.   Google Apps will then insert the email addresses into your email settings.

Change MX Records

OK, now the biggie.   The MX records shows which company handles and delivers your emails.   You need to change the records from your old email provider to Google so your emails can be sent to your Apps account.

It’s not a problem as Google provides step-by-step instructions for whoever your old email provider is.   Just choose your hosting service from the drop-down list and you will get instant specific instructions on where to go and what to do.

It basically involves locating the MX Records list in your hosting account (Google tells you where it is) and deleting them all (you may want to take a screenshot first in case you need to revert back).   Then in their place, enter the following :

Then save the whole lot. And that’s it – email set up!

As I said, it may be a little sluggish at first with emails trickling in slowly but once your Apps account is processed and set up by Google and your MX records get transitioned over, the email will start to come in a lot faster. Just be patient.

If you had your Apps email address already previously set up to forward everything to your old Gmail address, you need to go to the old Gmail address and cancel the forwarding rule.   Otherwise you will end up with two copies of the same email – one in your Gmail account and one in your Apps account.

Next, you can decide if you want to change the destination links for your calendar, Talk app, Documents and Sites (just like you may have changed the URL for your email inbox).   Then activate each service in the settings.

The last thing to do is go to the CNAME settings in your hosting account (again, Google points the way) and you need to enter each URL along with ghs.google.com .  That points everything to the Google servers.   Save everything and you-are-done!   Finito, The End.

All that remains to be done is browse through the settings and customise everything to your liking (for example, you can replace the Google logo witb your own customised logo).

I highly recommend moving over to Google Apps.   It’s a nice all-in-one online email, calendar and documents application.  The only grumble I have about it is that you can’t import your emails over from a normal Gmail account.  Google doesn’t provide any email exporting function so your emails are stuck in the other account – unless you go the long tedious way of downloading the emails to Outlook or Thunderbird and then using an import tool to re-upload them.  We covered one of these tools in the past.    But it is very easy to import your filters and contact book over and I had the email purring along in no time.

Do you have any experience of moving your online presence over to Google Apps?   If so, how did it go for you?   Please do let us know.   If you haven’t moved over yet, has this guide persuaded you to give it a go?   Feel free to leave all your questions and comments below.

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• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (22)
• Re:Subj – An Easy Temporary Inbox for Group Discussions (9)
• iContact – Bring your Gmail Contacts to the Desktop (13)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)

I expected this question after my previous post – How to Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook. So, let me continue where I left off and do a bit of Mozilla Thunderbird add-on hunting. After all, Mozilla’s rich add-on universe has a cure for every conceivable ‘problem’ except world hunger.

Yes, I found the answer in Mozdev.org. It’s the Mozilla developers’ community dedicated to open and free, quality applications and extensions – a perfect place to check out when you want to know how to set up Mozilla Thunderbird for anything.

Mail Tweak is a Thunderbird extension for Thunderbird ver. 2.0+. It’s a collection of enhancements and workarounds for the email client. The enhancements total around 36 (113KB) and one of them is called Personalize messages.

This ‘productivity’ tweak sends each recipient an individual message using fields from the address book or a CSV (comma separated values) file.

1. Go to the installation page of Mail Tweak at Mozdev.org. Download the mailtweak-0.16.xpi file to your computer.
2. Open Thunderbird. Select Tools – Add-ons – Extensions. Browse to the location of your downloaded file and install. Restart the Thunderbird client to complete.
3. Open the Add-on window (from Tools – Add-on) and select the Mail Tweak extension. Click on Options.
4. Scroll down the entries in the Tweaks section and select Personalize messages. Click OK.
5. You can now compose a message by selecting Message – Personalize message from the menu toolbar.

   Add your recipients (or a recipients list) as you normally do. You can include the contacts in other ways, of course.

   • Click on Address Book on the menu. Select the bunch of names – right click and choose Personalize from the context menu.
   • Open a new message window from Message – Personalize. Select the Personalize button on the menu and pick up the mail addresses from a CSV file.
6. To send the messages, click on File – Personalize (or click the Personalize button on the toolbar). An alert pops up with the option of ‘Send now’ or ‘Leave unsent’. With the latter option, Mail Tweak saves the messages (as individual emails) in the Unsent folder. After reviewing them you can email them from File – Send Unsent Messages.

Further personalize your email using Mail Tweak…

To include other fields like address, city, work phone etc. from the address book, specify field attributes in the emails. For example, to include the first name of each individual recipient – place a %%firstName%% where needed.
(All available address book field names are the properties as given in the nsIAbCard file. This is where all address fields of a particular contact are stored as attributes. Check out all the attributes here.)

Here’s an example to illustrate – to include the home address and the city of the contacts, include %% homeAddress%% and %%homeCity%% in the appropriate place. Similarly, it can be worked out for the other fields.

Without turning this into a soup of geeky codes and syntax, let me direct you to the Mail Tweaks Personal Messages section for some more help.

Although, Mail Tweak is built for the latest version, it can also be installed in Thunderbird 1.5 and in Shredder (pre-release versions of Thunderbird 3) with limited functionality.

MozDev.org does put out this caution – Performance may be poor if you use this feature for large messages or many recipients, and you might see warning messages from Thunderbird. For bulk mailing, it is better to use a specialized bulk mailing program.

That’s a good advice but for a home user’s run-of-the-mill mass mailing needs using the Thunderbird client, Mail Tweaks is a good enough productivity solution.

So, how often do you use bulk mailing? Do you think this solution is workable for you? Let us know if you have any other freeware to lessen the load.

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• How To Send Personalized Mass Emails in Outlook (26)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• 3 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft Outlook (19)
• How To Terminally Delete eMails In Thunderbird By Compacting Folders (14)
• How To Recover Deleted eMails in Thunderbird (9)

Before I leap ahead, mail merge is used when we want to create several documents that are basically the same but where each document contains unique details. For example, a set of letters where the content is the same but the name, address or even the subject bits are unique for each. The best use I have found – use it as a job hunting application with custom details for each employer.

The mail merge feature uses two parts – a main constant document and the inconstant data source – and merges them. With Outlook being a part of the MS Office suite, one can use this feature to bulk send mail, each personalized for a different contact (it ain’t spamming, although I guess mail merge is mass mailing by another name).

So here’s how to send mass emails in Outlook and make emails look personal:

Select contacts
1. Open Outlook. Go to Contacts and select the people whom you want to mail by Ctrl – clicking the multiple names on your contact list. To effectively select the multiple names, opt for View – Arrange by – Categories.
2. Remember: Mail merge does not work with distribution lists.

Mail merge contacts

3. On the menu bar, go to Tools – Mail Merge. The Mail Merge Contacts dialog box opens up.
4. For the fields bulleted under Contacts, choose Only selected contacts.
5. At the bottom, for Merge options – Merge to; select Email from the drop down. A Message subject line field appears. Fill it with the common subject. Click OK.

The completed dialog box looks like this…



Compose the email in Word

6. When you click OK, MS Word starts up and opens in a new document with the focus on the Mailings tab. You can use the default document or any other template you desire.
7. The selection of recipients has already been done from within Outlook. So, we will use the Write & Insert Fields panel to insert our custom fields.
8. For the word of greeting, click on Greeting Line. Configure the greeting as you want it to appear.
9. To insert any other contact specific like a home address or a phone number, click on Insert Merge Field for a large drop down list.
10. Write the body of the email in the Word document.
11. Once you are finished with the fields you want to include, preview the final look by clicking on Preview Results and then moving through your recipients by clicking on the previous and next record buttons in the Preview Results panel.

    
    All that remains… Mail it!

12. Click on Finish & Merge – Send E-mail Messages. The Merge to E-mail dialog box opens up. Click on OK.

MS Word then does the job of automatically posting the emails in a flash. You can save the document you used for the mail merge, as it also saves the link with the data source i.e. the contacts.

Once you get the hang of it, the whole process takes barely a few minutes from start to finish. In the same time I would have earlier composed an email for just a single person; now, I did so for a group. So here’s how we managed to save on repetitive typing and save up on time.

Any other way to send personalized mass emails in Outlook? Do you use mail merge for email? Or the more common fields of carbon copy (cc) and the ‘anonymous’ blind carbon copy (bcc)? So, what are your productivity tips for Outlook? Share with them with us!

Image: ’smil

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• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
• How to Set Up Microsoft Outlook to Schedule Email Delivery (6)
• How to Restart or Shut Down Your Computer Remotely using Microsoft Outlook (12)
• How to Email Smarter With Buit-In Time Zone Converters (8)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)

A few posts back, I had put up something on 10 Little Known Google Pages worth a Second Look. Now, here’s another section of Google which is far more useful and worthy of a bookmark.

Do you feel lost amidst the myriad options within Gmail? Some features pass by even the most involved users; I should know as I am one of them. Or on the other hand, you might have to explain Gmail to a rank babe-in-the-wood.

If its the straight and easy help one seeks on Gmail, then who could be better than the experts at Google itself.

The page is not immediately apparent from the home page of either Google or Gmail and one has to search and click twice to land here. So if you constantly need to refer to Gmail’s help, it’s better to bookmark the Gmail Tips page.

The way of the Ninja

The best thing about this section is that it takes a learner’s (and leaner) approach instead of dishing out the usual ‘Help and Support’ geek-speak. What’s with the ‘Ninja’ thing? The goal of Gmail Tips is to teach the user all the ins and outs of Gmail towards an ultimate goal of better email management. That’s the way towards productivity.

The Gmail Tips page has been put together from the contributions of Gmail boffins and what they think are the best productivity ideas. The Gmail Tips page does not follow a straight-laced approach as we see in most help pages. That’s what scares away most technophobes amongst us, I guess. The page is more of a ‘How to’.

The page is divided into four sections each for a particular level of use.

White belt: I get a few messages a day
Simple tips like how to organize your email with labels.

Green belt: I get a dozen or so messages a day
For instance, ways to use Tasks as a handy to-do list.

Black belt: I get a lot of messages a day
Tip on how to enable offline Gmail and take it with you anywhere.

Gmail master: I get a massive number of messages a day
I didn’t know about this one – Forget to sign out of a public computer? Sign out remotely.

Ninja gear for the course

The expanding list of tips and info are just one facet of the course. Also, included are embedded video clips which further help out.

Especially handy is the 600KB printable guide which can be downloaded and kept as ready reference for all the tips listed on the site page. Presently, just two-paged… I can imagine that it will grow as more tips get added (A free laminated version was also there for the taking but it has run out).

From a link at the bottom of the page, you too can share your own tips or upload a video to Google’s YouTube channel.

The Gmail Tips page is an effective course for someone new to Gmail. But even old hands can pick up a tip or two.

Here at MakeUseof.com, we aren’t doing too badly either with ways to make the most of Gmail. Whether it’s the Ultimate GMail Collection of over 80 Tools and Tips or How to Stay Connected with Gmail , our complete list of posts on Gmail covers quite a lot of ground.

Also, you can’t be a ninja without downloading out cheat sheets! Check them out.

Would Gmail Tips find a place amongst your bookmarks? Let us know in the comments.

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• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Customize Your GMail Inbox with Gmail Web Clips (4)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account [Part II] (10)
• How To Access Hotmail Email Messages from Your Gmail Account (31)

After creating your ReBoxed user account, you’ll be directed to your Google Account to allow ReBoxed access to your Gmail inbox and contact information. You don’t have to provide your password but this does permit ReBoxed to peek into your inbox automatically whenever you use their service.

After ReBoxed collects the list of your contacts, it will as you to vote for them according to importance, which is just a nice way of asking you to prioritize your contacts. You’ll be presented with two choices from which you must select whose messages are more important. You may also mark a contact as a VIP or mark that address as belonging to an automated service.

After you’re done voting, you’ll arrive at your inbox view. ReBoxed seems to only display unread messages from GMail. Messages from VIPs will be displayed at the very top, followed by messages from ranked senders and finally, bulk mailers.

For example, while a message from PayPal is important (and thus highlighted), it’s still a “robot” sending the message, and is not as important as messages from my colleagues and editors. Messages from my family would rank at the very top, having marked them as VIPs, above my colleagues. You have the option of voting a few more times in order to train the filters.

Clicking the messages will open that them in Gmail, where you can reply, delete etc. ReBoxed is an easy tool to help get your important matters read and out of the way at the beginning of your day.

How do you fight email overload? Give us some tips in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Save Time with Gmail Email Templates using “Canned Responses” (20)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part II) (12)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part 1) (19)
• How To Setup Gmail SMS Alerts For Urgent Emails for Free (26)

How POP Peeper Can Make You More Productive

Think about all of the email accounts that you have. You likely have an email account with your ISP, but you probably also have one or more Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail accounts. Some people have from 5 to 10 email accounts or more, and staying on top all of those accounts can be tedious and time consuming. This is where POP Peeper can save the day.

POP Peeper is a non-intrusive, free email notification service that runs in your windows taskbar and utilizes just a very small memory footprint. In many ways, it’s a lot like your standard email client, however you can set it up only as a notification service where it just checks all of your email accounts and alerts you to when and where an email comes in.

Setting up POP Peeper is a very quick and easy process. You can configure it to read your emails from a POP3, IMAP, or one of the many webmail accounts that’s supported.  In this guide I’ll cover the three scenerios that I use a lot, POP3, customized POP3 Gmail accounts, and a Yahoo webmail account.

POP3 Setup: Configuring a POP3 Account With POP Peeper

Setting up a POP3 email account on POP Peeper is just a matter of filling out two small screens worth of information, and you’re done.  You just insert the basic information for incoming and outgoing mail servers, such as below, where I’ve set up my POP3 account for RealityUncovered emails.

Obviously, you’ll need to know your POP3 server, login name and password, as well as whether the account is set up with SSL or not. If you don’t know those answers, check with the administrator who set up the email account for you. You’ll also notice a color box to the right of the account setup – this will color code all messages coming from this particular source.

Setting up SMTP outgoing allows you to reply to emails from within POP Peeper if you want to. HOwever, if you just want to use POP Peeper as an email notification service, this isn’t really necessary. But if you don’t want to bother opening up your email client or webmail account in order to reply, then you can insert your outgoing SMTP information here.

Gmail POP3: Configuring a Gmail Account With POP Peeper

When someone provides you with a customized Gmail account for an organization that you work for, it doesn’t really work like a standard Gmail account. These are customized accounts that you can access by enabling the POP3 setting within your Gmail mailbox. First, log into your Gmail account, click on “Settings,” and then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.”  Within this section, you can enable the ability to access your mail via POP access.

Once you enable POP within your Gmail account, you can then set up your account in POP Peeper just like you would with a regular POP3 account.

For Gmail, the Incoming mail server is pop.gmail.com, and outgoing is smtp.gmail.com.  Make sure to use your full email address as your login name and you’re good to go.

Free Webmail Accounts: Setting Up Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and others with POP Peeper

If you have a free webmail account (or several) like Yahoo, Hotmail and others, setting up access to those accounts through POP Peeper couldn’t be easier.  Access to a long list of free online email services is supported by this application.  All you need to do is select the service, enter your account details, and the software will immediately integrate with your online account.

Again, color code the source and you’re golden. It really doesn’t get any easier than this.

Configuring Notifications, Email Access and Other Features

Once you have POP Peeper set up to poll your long list of email accounts for you, all that’s left is to set up the application to behave as you’d like it to.  There are many features you can tweak, but the most important items you’ll want to configure if you want the app to run as efficiently as possible are storage settings, polling interval and notification options.

You can configure the application so that it only downloads the message headers and doesn’t store the message to disk. This is the best option if you just want notification and would rather not use the application as your mail client.

Next, set up how often you want the application to go out and poll all of your email accounts.  Another option is that you can “Enable Time Scheduling,” meaning you can set the application to only go out and poll your accounts at specific times during the day. Check your email only at lunchtime? Set up POP Peeper to go out and pull down all of your emails around that time.

My favorite feature of POP Peeper is the ability to configure how it notifies you when you have new emails. You can have it play a sound file, flash the Scroll Lock light, pop up a balloon from the tray icon and open up the application automatically. You set the level of notification you want that you won’t find too annoying while you’re trying to work.

Your Email Control Center

Using POP Peeper is pretty cool, once you have all of your accounts set up from around the web. This is the best way to consolidate those dozens of email accounts that you’re constantly forgetting to check. Now you’ll never miss another email again.

The cool thing about this “control center” for all of your email accounts is that you can either view all of your emails in one place, color coded by account, or you can select a particular account that you want to focus on. The option is yours. However you use it, POP Peeper will make sure that you’re instantly aware the moment anyone ever sends you another email to that obscure email account that you hardly ever use any more. Now you can keep track of everything in one convenient place.

Do you have your own methods of managing your many email accounts? Share your techniques in the comments section below.

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• How to Set Up Mozilla Thunderbird to Send Mass Emails (17)
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And the ‘>’ which goes onto become ‘>>’ with each forward doesn’t make for a pretty mail.  Essentially if I want to use that same text I have to take it with all the undesirable formatting.

It is an irksome problem which begs for a simple solution. My earlier way involved copying the text to Notepad (or NotePad2) and using the Find/Replace functions to remove the undesirables from the text. I was looking for something which could cut down on the three steps of Notepad.

The outcome of my hunt introduced me to the following ways :

StripMail

A handy freeware utility designed for just this problem. StripMail (v0.99j) can be used with any email program to clean up the text. StripMail formats the mail text by cleaning the ‘>’ and ‘|’ from forwarded e-mails. It organizes the text into paragraphs and indents the right margin thus making the text easier on the eyes.

The 279KB executable runs as a standalone executable. Yes, I still have to do the copy paste thing but thereafter StripMail handles the cleanup operation with one touch operations. There is a Do it all button which is like a master switch handling all the stripping and pasting operations in one go.

eMailStripper

Get rid of all those pesky ‘>’ characters with this freeware utility. Paste the message text into eMailStripper and Strip It. The software bumps off the indentation characters at the beginning of lines and also brings together the lines to make the whole message a bit more legible.

EMailStripper (v2.2) was probably not meant for sophisticated operations as it lacks configuration options. But for a neat little formatting job, the light program is worth a download. The program is compatible with Microsoft Windows (all versions) and Linux (under WINE).

You might also like to read Mark’s review of the software here.

Clippy

Clippy takes the pain away from the painstaking task of reformatting multiple-forwarded emails. Apart from removing the ‘>’ character, Clippy also realigns the lines, wipes any HTML tags, converts case and removes line breaks among a host of functions. Copy the text to the clipboard and click on Clippy installed in the system tray. Clippy works on the text and all you need to do is to paste it back where you need it.

Clippy can also be configured with other functions (like count words, convert between DOS and Unix formatting and also between white space characters and tabs, change the case of characters and even replace strings) through its Edit option.

Clippy (v1.20) is compatible with Windows (Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP) and can be alternatively be downloaded from here as the author site seemed to be down.

If you have been at the receiving end of emails populated with ‘>’ and ‘>>’ then you should surely save the next soul some annoyance by cleaning it up and only then sending it forth. It’s not only for the sake of clarity but it is also in the interest of good email etiquette.

Do you think that clean email forwards make for a good practice? If you do clean up your emails, what methods do you apply? Give us your opinion without a ‘>’.

Photo Credit : Tim Morgan

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Gmail Labs is full of experimental new features that you can choose to use or not use. There are ways to do small organizational things like move your chat box to the right side, and ways to do bigger and more obvious things (like use Gmail offline!)

Here are five Gmail Labs apps (or you can call them features) that, once enabled, make Gmail an even better application for all your emailing needs.

Access Gmail Offline

I’ll give you three guesses what this one does, but you won’t need two of them. Gmail finally, FINALLY, has released support for Google Gears, the application that lets you take web apps offline. What this means is that you can be using Gmail, lose your Internet connection, and never notice the difference. Your messages, attachments, etc. are constantly synced with your desktop, and can be used while offline.

All emails you write or changes you make are synced back to the server when you go online again. There’s also a “Flaky Connection Mode” that only tries to connect to the server when you make a change – that way, you can keep reading emails without the long load times, etc.

Gmail’s now a step closer to Outlook, and Microsoft had better be (even more) worried.

Tasks

One of the things I never liked about Gmail was that there was no easy way to manage my tasks: I was constantly switching tabs or windows, and it wasn’t as fluid as Outlook’s task-email integration. Well, no longer. Gmail has released their own, admittedly still basic, task list than can be accessed right from the Gmail window. You can create due dates, sub-tasks, and a number of other things using the incredibly simple interface in your Gmail window.

If you’ve already got a task manager, like I do, there are other options. Remember the Milk, in particular, has a great Gmail gadget that can be added right to your sidebar, letting you manage all your tasks quickly and easily in the Gmail window. Adding the gadget is easy – check out these instructions.

Calendar

This is a small issue, but makes a big difference: a lot of the email I get is time sensitive, and asking me when I can do or am doing a particular thing. Before, checking my calendar against my email was difficult, involving resizing two windows next to each other and a lot of annoyance.

Now, with the Google Calendar Gadget for Gmail, my calendar lives in the sidebar of my Gmail window, and is available to me at all times. I can see my schedule at a glance, add to it right from Gmail, and keep a firm grasp on what I’m supposed to be doing, and when. Simple calendar integration is another chink in Outlook’s armor, and another huge step in the right productivity direction for Gmail.

Multiple Inboxes

Want to see your inbox and the emails you need to respond to, all at the same time? How about your inbox, your reminders, and your emails on a given topic? Done. With the new Multiple Inboxes Labs feature, you can see up to five extra panels that you can fill with any label or search term, right next to your inbox.

It’s a great way to keep tabs on filters, or anything else you need to check regularly, all at once.

Time-Saving Buttons

Google has recently seemed to be noticing the little things in Gmail, and is taking steps to make your experience as simple, and involving as few mouse clicks, as possible. Two such features are the “Mark as Read” button and the “Send and Archive” button.

They do just what they sound like. You can mark a message as read without going into it, or into a complicated menu. Or, you can send a message and get it out of your inbox, all in one click. Both of these mean you’re not devoting more time or brainpower to emails you’ve already dealt with and can move on to the next thing.

OK I lied. That was six features. There’s just too many great things about Gmail! Google is making a concerted effort to pay attention to their flagship products, like Gmail, and it’s becoming obvious – Gmail is becoming more productive, easier to use, and a truly viable alternative to Outlook (or any desktop email client).

All these features are available to Gmail users, and most or all are available to those on Google Apps. To add them, go to “Settings,” and click the “Labs” tab. In Labs, go through and click the “Enable” radio button next to the ones you want. Refresh Gmail, and you’ll see all your new features!

Which Gmail Labs apps do you prefer? One of the above or another? Tell us why you like them!

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For those whose preferred email client is Microsoft Outlook 2007 on a standalone machine, here are five ways to backup your Microsoft Outlook data, avoid stress and save your data. Please note that the following applies to data files only and not to toolbar settings, signature files and profile entries.

1. Manually copy your Outlook file

   • The default location for XP is C:/Documents and Settings/%username%/Local Settings/Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook/
   • The default location for Vista is C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Outlook/

Outlook stores all mail information in a single file with an extension ‘.pst’. A ‘personal storage table’ file stores all account data like mails, contacts, journal, notes and calendar entries.

The PST file can also be accessed by following File – Data File Management – Select the Data File tab. Select your personal folder(s) and click on Open Folder…

After locating the file backing it up to any secure space like a different drive, a CD-ROM or a USB Drive is a simple process of copy-paste.

To restore the data, go to File – Open – Outlook Data File – Browse to the backup location and select the file. In case of an error, right-click and deselect the Read only attribute in the PST file’s Properties tab.

2. Relocate your Outlook file

   In the same way we keep our other precious files from harm’s way by saving it in a different partition, we can also change the default location of the Outlook PST file. Here’s a walkthrough…

   1. Close Outlook
   2. Locate the PST file through the default path as mentioned before.
   3. Copy it to another partition.

   (As a precaution rename the PST file in the old location. For instance, change Outlook.pst to Outlook.old. In case something fails, you can return to the old file.)

   4. Restart Outlook – when the prompt comes up use the browse button to direct Outlook to the new location.
   5. Update any Wizard rules you might have customized with the new path.

3. Import and Export helps out

   It is a 5-Step process which exports your mail folders to any designated location. Import and Export in Outlook 2007 allows you to export the entire Personal folder or selected folders to another location (or partition).

   1. Click on File – Import and Export…

   

   2. Choose Export to a file

   

   3. Choose Personal Folder File (.pst)

   

   4. Select the folder to export from – e.g. Personal Folder. Check Include Subfolders if you want to include all subfolders (like contacts) within the Personal Folder. You can set up a selective backup through a Filter to export specific messages.

   

   5. Choose a safe location to store the exported file. A press of the Finish button ends the job.

   

To restore the data, similarly follow the wizard starting with File – Import and Export…- Import from another program or file – Personal Folder File (.pst) – browse to backup location and click finish.

Note: The Import and Export way is not sacrosanct because it does not backup user set settings (i.e. the folder design properties) like view options, forms, permissions, rules and alerts or auto-archive settings.

4. The Personal Folders Backup Add-In to the rescue

The earlier steps might send the work-shy among us into a slumber. The help of a Microsoft Outlook Add-in – ‘Personal Folders Backup’ saves us a few mouse clicks. It simply creates backup copies of the PST files at regular intervals to a designated location.

With the 159KB download installed, browse to File – Backup. The Options setting in the tool lets you select the frequency of backups, the files to backup and the location to backup to.



The Personal Folders Backup Add-In is supported by Outlook 2007, 2003 and 2002.

5. Go for a Third Party software

Here at MakeUseOf, we have covered a lot of ground talking about third party software’s. You can find a post on 5 Ways to Keep Your Emails backed Up and one on the Amic Email Backup tool.

Third party software is warranted in situations where you have to deal with multiple clients. In my humble opinion, if you are only looking to backup Microsoft Outlook data, the above enumerated solutions can be effective safety nets.

Have you backed up your Microsoft Outlook 2007 emails yet? Do you think taking these proactive steps now will save you some heartburn later? Let us know…

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Chances are you are receiving too many. Hopefully you’re receiving little spam, but certainly you have a lot of mail hitting your inbox that doesn’t need your immediate attention. Maybe you even receive private stuff at work that you should rather not attend to at all until you’re home.

So what to do about it? Ignore it while it’s staring at you from your inbox? Waste some time by sorting it manually?

If you’re using Thunderbird I can show you a smart solution: set up message filters and have Thunderbird auto-sort messages into different folders of your choice.

In Thunderbird go to >”Tools” >”Message Filters”.

From the >”Filters for:” menu choose the account you wish to set up a filter for. Then click the “New…” button on the right side and the “Filter Rules” window for a new message filter will open.

You can set as many rules as you like, for example mails from your mom’s eMail address that contain your sister’s name in the message body and are CC’d to your dad should be sorted into the urgent family business folder. For each new rule click the + button behind the last rule.

You can also sort several different mails that you receive on a daily basis into one folder. For example set up a rule that catches all mail from MakeUseOf (Sender contains MakeUseOf.com), then set up a different rule within the same Filter for each of the other newsletters or eMail updates you would like to sort into the same folder.

Of course you cannot just sort mails into folders. You can have the message filters perform several other actions as seen in the menu pictured above. For example, automatically “Mark As Read”, “Tag Message” or (the coolest) reply with a template. If required you can have the message filter carry out multiple actions on the same eMail.

With a bit of discipline you can have the flood of eMails that are arriving in your inbox each and every day nicely sorted within minutes and you’ll never again miss an important message that reaches your inbox totally unfiltered.

MakeUseOf have published several posts about Mozilla Thunderbird before, including 2 part series on Thunderbird addons:

PART 2: 10 Great Thunderbird Addons You Must Have
PART 1: 10 must-have Thunderbird Addons

How do you manage incoming mail? We would love to hear your tips and tricks!

Picture credits: ilco

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The whole thing is fairly simple. I am pretty sure some of you have been using it already.

First you need to get free email to SMS gateway for your mobile carrier. If you didn’t get it last time you can easily do so now. The page lists email-to-sms gateways for 10 major US carrier and lots of international ones.

Once you have the email for your mobile number (say 1234567890@tmomail.net), simply login to your Gmail account and go straight to Settings -> Filters tab. Now, there are two ways to use this.

1- Get SMS Alerts for Emails from Specific Addresses

The first way is to setup SMS alerts for emails coming from certain people or places that you consider important. These can be emails from your employer, bank, hosting provider, site uptime tracker etc.

Create new filter and enter the email address for which you want to receive SMS alert.

In the next step, setup a Forward rule to your free email-to-sms number.

Click on “Create Filter” and you’re done. Next time you receive email from that address you’ll also get SMS message with about first 150 characters of the email. As simple as that.

2- Get SMS For Urgent Emails If You’re Away

Say you’re on holiday and don’t want to be bugged with regular work related emails. However at the same time you want to make sure that when it’s something really urgent people can reach you.

Here is what you can do. First create an auto-responder message (see in Setting -> General) that looks something like the one below.

Then go to ‘Filters’ tab and setup a forward filter for it. As you can see, in the above auto-responder message I provided sender with option to reach me by simply emailing me again using “urgent” in the subject line.

As soon as email hits my inbox I get texted to my mobile.

Are you using anything similar to that right now? Share with us in comments.

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As such, it is time for us to re-visit the list of Thunderbird addons and update our readers with the latest list of must-have Thunderbird addons. (If you never heard of Thunderbird before, it’s an email client from Mozilla, just like Microsoft’s Outlook but a lot more customizable.)

1. Lightning and its related addons

If you are looking to use Thunderbird to replace your Outlook (or Evolution in Linux), then Lightning is a must-have extension. It adds calendar and task management capabilities to Thunderbird and allows you to manage your daily schedule all within Thunderbird.

At the same time, there are also several Lightning-related extensions that further enhances the functionality and capabilities of Lightning.

ThunderBirthday and MoreFunctionsForAddressBook: MoreFunctionsForAddressBook is an extension that increases the number of fields that you can include in your address book. You now have the option to include the birthday, photo ID, spouse name etc. ThunderBirthday, on the other hand, extracts birthday information from your address book and updates it to the Lightning. With this, you don’t have to manually enter the birthday entry in your Lightning and you won’t ever forget your best friend’s birthday again.

.vcs support: This extension allows you to export your Lightning entries to .vcs format. Currently it only supports .ics, .csv and .htm format.

Remember The Milk Integration: This is still an experiemental addon, but it is in no way inferior than the rest. If you love Remember The Milk, then you are going to love this extension as well. As its name implies, this extension will integrate and sync RTM with Lightning.

2. Thunderbrowse

When someone sends you a link, wouldn’t it be great if you can open the link and browse the Web right within your Thunderbird? Thunderbrowse is here just to serve that purpose. After you have installed this extension, whenever you click on a link within your mail, the message pane will become a full-fledged browser and allow you to view the website without having to open up a browser window.

Like Firefox, it supports tabbed browsing and javascript. In addition, with Thunderbrowse, you can install the Thunderbird extension within itself. There is no need to download the xpi file and install it via the Tools -> Addons section.

3. Foxclocks

If you are like me who always corresponds with partners all around the world, you will appreciate the usefulness of Foxclock. Foxclock is an extension that lets you keep watch of the time around the world by putting small clocks in your statusbar. Next time when you send an email to your partner, you will know why he doesn’t reply to you instantly. He could most probably be sleeping in his country.

In addition, Foxclocks also integrates well with Google Earth. If you don’t know where Budapest is, simply right click and choose  ‘Google Earth…’. It will bring you to where it is.

4. Quicktext

Quicktext is useful for several purposes:

1. It allows you to create templates so that you don’t have to spend lot of time replying repetitive emails.
2. It allows you to create multiple signatures and insert them accordingly to the person you are sending to.
3. It allows you to substitute specific text with a predefined variable, such as [[TO=firstname]]

If you are one who has to send repetitive emails all the time, this extension is the one that you must have.

5. Thunderbird Biff

Thunderbird Biff checks your email in the background and notifies you (in Firefox or Sunbird) when new mail has arrived. To get this extension to work, you will need to install the Thunderbird Biff server version of Thunderbird and the client version in Firefox/Sunbird. Once it is installed, it will display an icon at the status bar. Whenever a new mail has arrived, the icon will pop up and notify you.

6. Sync Kolab

Sync Kolab uses the Kolab technology to synchronize your address book and calendar (Lightning) with several other computers and platform. Basically, it makes use of an IMAP server to do the synchronization. It supports vCard/iCal/xml format and is compatible with a lot of other mail/calendar clients.

7. Auto Address Cleaner

Auto Address Cleaner cleans up your address field and eliminates any chances of offending the recipients by using wrong (possibly mistyped in the address book) names in the To/Cc fields. Instead of displaying the name of the recipient, it will only show their email address.

8. Google-related addons

For those who are fans of Google apps or you simply can’t live without Google, here are some of the extensions that integrates Google apps into Thunderbird.

Gmail IMAP setup – enables you to setup Gmail IMAP account with almost zero configuration.
Google Contact – synchronizes Thunderbird with Google contacts.
Provider for Google Calendar – allows bi-directional sync between Lightning and Google Calendar.

9. Check and Send

Have you ever sent an email and realized that you didn’t attach a file to it? The Check and Send extension checks your message content, subject and address before you send the message. You can define a specified keyword for it to look out for (such as ‘attachment’, ‘attached files’) and inform you when no attachment was found. You can also use it to check if certain words exist in the message or if the recipient is in the address book.

10. Tags Toolbar

Are you missing your favorite tags in Gmail? You can have it now. Tag Toolbar allows you to add tags for your email. You can define your own tags, specify the color and there is a nice toolbar that makes it easy for you to tag your emails.

Do check out Aibek’s article for the other 35 must have Thunderbird addons.

Also, don’t forget to download the Thunderbird cheat sheet that contains plenty of excellent shortcuts for Thunderbird users. Highly recommended.

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Let’s say for example that you want to write for us here at MakeUseOf (and why wouldn’t you want to?  We’ll pay you with all the money, beer and fast cars you can handle!  Er, well….no, not really).   So, as editor I go through approximately 7-10 applications a day so over the course of a week, that can stack up quite a bit.   We don’t like to keep people guessing over whether or not we’ve received their application so it’s good to set up a “thank you we have your application, we’ll get back to you soon” auto-responder email which is sent out as soon as their application hits our inbox.

So here’s how you would set it up, using Gmail’s new filter.

First write your autoresponder message in a blank email window in Gmail.  Then save your message as a “canned response”.  I briefly covered how to do this a while back.   You can now discard your email window and go back to your inbox.

Go to “settings” in the top right hand corner of Gmail, then to the “filters” sub-tab.   Scroll right down to the bottom to “create a new filter”

This then brings up the “create a filter” section.   This is the important part.   Make sure everything in this section is BLANK except for the “to:” section. In this section, put in the email address that the autoresponder message should acknowledge all replies to.   In this case, I have put our applications email address post4us@makeuseof.com which means that whenever an email arrives to that address, the autoresponder email will automatically kick in and send itself out. Then click “next step”.



We’re almost done. The last and final screen asks you to “choose an action”.   This is where you tell it to choose the canned response. So….tick “send canned response” and drop down the menu to choose the correct canned response. Then click “create filter”.

That is it. Now everytime someone emails an application to that email address, they will get an autoresponder message (or “canned response” as Gmail likes to call them). You can do the same too for your blog, your company, your club, your school and much more. If your inbox is overflowing and people are complaining that your email response times suck, then set up an autoresponder message to at least confirm that “you have received their message and that you’ll get back to them as soon as possible”. OK the email is automatic, it’s impersonal and it’s bland – but hey it’s a response! You won’t even know the email has gone out as it’s all done in the background.

What do you think? Is this something you might find useful to help with your email management or does this just add to the problem?

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So what makes Zenbe different? There are a lot of things, but here are the highlights.

First, Zenbe helps you centralize. Bring all your emails in one. It helps you cut down on your account clutter by bringing together in one window your email, task lists, files, and calendar. You can also use Zenbe to manage all your email addresses. It allows you to send from any email address and downloads outside email messages via POP.

Second, Zenbe has awesome features. What other email client do you know of that allows you to use Twitter and check your Facebook updates while reading your latest email? That’s just the beginning, though. Zenbe has a full featured calendar that includes support for iCal subscriptions, and, unlike some competitors (*cough* Google *cough*), the developers included task lists.

The file view is awesome, too. It takes all your email attachments and makes them available in their own separate tab. You can search, tag, star, or sort them by file type. Audio and video files can be played right in your browser, and images can be previewed in a neat lightbox.

In addition, Zenbe has partnered with Scribd for document previewing, so you can view documents without downloading them to your computer. You no longer have to email files to yourself, either, since Zenbe lets you upload files without emailing them. With 4GB of storage, there is plenty of space to use Zenbe as a repository for your important documents and media.

I’ve mentioned only some of Zenbe’s features. There are many more, and everything – from the contact manager to the tagging system – is innovative.

The best part about Zenbe, though, is that it’s still evolving. While other email providers will go months without any updates, Zenbe is constantly adding new features. For example, the Zenbe team is currently testing a unique conversation view, as well as an innovative “favorites inbox” that shows you emails from the people you care about most.

Zenbe really does have some of the best features I’ve seen in an email client. It incorporates them in an elegant way, too, so you aren’t overwhelmed with clutter.

What about you? What features would you like to see in the inbox of the future? Let us know in the comments.

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