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Email Innovations You Want in Your Inbox
Posted by Gina Trapani at 2:02 AM on August 19, 2008
The basics of how email works hasn't changed much since its invention, but even forty years later, there are still tiny features and enhancements that can make dealing with large volumes of email easier. Your email client already provides message attachments, filtering, HTML email, auto-fill contacts, spell-checking, folders or labels, keyboard shortcuts, search, and an advanced spam filter. What else do you need? Well, as people rely on email as a primary means of communication, and everyday users deal with a mounting level of new messages per day, even more advanced features can help all of us keep our inbox under control. In honour of Mozilla Thunderbird 3's latest alpha release, let's take a look at some email innovations—some concept, some already available in various clients and plug-ins—that you want in your inbox.
We first took a look at Chandler, the open-source, cross-platform personal information manager 
The latest version of the free, open-source email manager, Thunderbird, is in the wild—in an alpha release rough enough around the edges to earn the code-name "Shredder." It doesn't have all the features promised for Thunderbird 3 yet, but you can see where it's headed. I installed "Shredder" in Windows XP, and I'll show you what's there, and explain what's coming soon, after the jump.
Once upon a time, gigabytes of storage space and message labels and IMAP access in web-based email was unheard of—until Gmail raised the industry bar and user expectations of what you get with your free webmail account. But now that we're all used to Gmail's goodness, it's time to cast a critical eye at the little niggly things that are missing from Gmail's web client. This week I spent two hours wrestling two Gmail accounts to the ground trying to hack together a filtered auto-response that only goes to certain annoying senders. (The approach 
When you send out that email request you're waiting to hear back about, you can automatically shuttle it into a "Waiting For" folder with the right outgoing rule. Microsoft Outlook expert Taco Oosterkamp recommends adding a unique and unnoticeable notation at the end of any email you're waiting on (he uses 
Windows only: 
Make it seem like you're sending email when you're really playing hooky with Outlook's built-in "defer delivery" rule. Tech blogger Dennis O'Reilly runs down how to set up Outlook to delay sending messages for a certain amount of time (like half an hour) automatically. You can also set individual messages to be sent on certain days at certain times in Outlook—good for scheduling future messages ahead of time.
The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that's probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words "Inbox" and "unread messages." The tools available to read and send emails have advanced considerably since then, but what you actually do with all that chatter, without eating up entire days of work time, is up to you. Luckily, we've covered a wealth of filtering and processing methods and software tweaks that make email less stressful and time-consuming over the years, and a list of our top 10 productive email boosters is after the jump.
