6 Impressive Gmail Tools You Might Have Missed

Gmail has been around for more than a decade. It's already good, but there are plenty of Gmail tools to make it all kinds of better. We have covered some smart ones that improve your Gmail experience on Chrome, help you write better emails, and some that even help you with your job search.

Now it's time to introduce you to a few more tools that you might have missed. Let's see how they can help if you have a Gmail account.

Mixmax: To Snooze Email, Add Polls, Create Templates

Mixmax is the Swiss Army knife of Gmail tools. It's one of those tools that deserve an article of their own, but for now an introduction will have to do.

Mixmax does everything from email snoozing and scheduling to template creation and embedded surveys. You can upgrade the compose window and write with Markdown. One of its top benefits is easier scheduling of meetings. You pick a few dates that work for you in your calendar and your guest then picks one of them that's convenient for him or her, saving a lot of back and forth emailing.

With Mixmax, you can also add attachments from Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box, including files larger than 25MB.

The app comes in the form of a Chrome extension. Once you install and activate it, your Gmail's Compose window will gain several more features, including a Send Later button and a services menu from which you can create polls and surveys, add calendar invites, share meeting availability, etc. You'll also see a couple of options for snoozing and tracking emails.

If you're an Inbox by Gmail user, Mixmax works for you too. It has a limited free version. Pro plans start at $12/month (or $9/month if billed annually).

Typeless brings all your contacts from various popular web services to your Gmail inbox and lets you share them effortlessly. No more copy-pasting email addresses and phone numbers from Contacts in Gmail!

Once you sign up for Typeless and connect at least one of your web accounts for importing contacts from, you're good to go. You'll see detailed contact profiles in your inbox à la Rapportive.

Typeless can bring in contacts from Gmail, Linkedin, Facebook, Outlook, Salesforce, etc. The best thing about Typeless? It allows you to connect multiple Gmail accounts. It also has a Chrome extension [No longer available] as well as a separate app for users of Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013.

Charlie: To Get Acquainted Before You Get Introduced

How many times have you found yourself running web searches for people you're about to meet for work? Quite often for it to be time consuming, right? You don't need to do that anymore, because Charlie is here to take over from you.

You know those "bad guy" dossiers that detectives put together in spy movies? Charlie gives you something like that, minus the thick files and for "un"sinister reasons. And about far nicer people of course.

Once you sign up for the web version of Charlie and link it with your Google account, Charlie swings into action and gives you one-pagers about people you're going to sit across from in your next meeting. You'll get a mix of personal and professional information about people — social network updates, mentions on the web, and details that you can use as conversation starters. Here's a quick snapshot of the kind of one-pager you can expect from Charlie.

Wondering how Charlie pulls up the right information? That's based on the contact details of attendees in your meeting invites. You'll get these data alerts an hour before you have to walk into any meeting. You can also get Charlie's insights on the iPhone.

SaneBox: To Filter Unimportant Emails

SaneBox herds all incoming unimportant emails to a separate folder (SaneLater), so that the emails that are most important to you can rise to the top in your inbox. Don't worry that SaneBox will delete the unimportant emails. It won't; it will just keep them out of your way.

After you give SaneBox access to your Gmail account, it will walk you through a few review screens to:

Understand what kind of emails you'd like to defer
Show you how you can train SaneBox to identify unimportant emails

The app adds another folder (named SaneNoReplies) to your inbox to store important email threads that you need to follow up on.

With SaneBox, you can also send reminders to yourself and move file attachments to your favorite cloud storage service. It comes with a free 14-day trial. No credit card required! Paid plans start at $12 a month.

Ugly Email: To See If an Email Is Getting Tracked

If you'd like to know which emails in your inbox are being tracked, Ugly Email is for you. Its function is straightforward. Once you install the UglyEmail Chrome extension, it sniffs out the emails that come with a "tracking device" and marks them with an eye icon. This makes it easy for you to identify which emails are keeping tabs on your clicks and opens without having to open the emails themselves.

Now, what you choose to do with that information is up to you. You could ignore the email and not open it or you could use another tool to block the trackers. Ignoring the tracking itself and moving on with your curiosity satisfied is another option, but probably not an easy choice.

Morning Mail: To Swipe Mail Left and Right

You probably guessed from the title that Morning Mail is Tinder for email. It works with Gmail, but is not limited to it. It is limited to iOS devices [No longer available] though, and is great for Inbox Zero enthusiasts.

New emails appear as cards in your inbox, and as you'd expect, swiping cards left deletes messages. Swiping right archives them and swiping down marks them as read. You also have a regular inbox view, and swiping left and right works in this view as well.

Gmail, Gmail, and More Gmail

We're all for boosting Gmail's capabilities, but we wouldn't recommend adding every Gmail app that comes your way. Be discerning and choose the ones that really serve some purpose in your workflow, not those that just look good on the surface. And while you're powering up Gmail with useful apps, explore some of Gmail's underused native features as well.

Which are the latest Gmail tools you have come across that deserve more attention? Share your finds with us in the comments.