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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.
All platforms with Thunderbird: The gContactSync add-on synchronises your contacts between Gmail and Thunderbird's address book. While gContactSync syncs email addresses without a hitch, it is a little fussier about the formatting of the street address fields. If you're a Thunderbird power user with a large set of Gmail contacts to import and synchronise, it's definitely worth the inconvenience of tweaking your Gmail contacts. Fortunately there's a 
All platforms running Thunderbird: Thunderbird extension Zindus syncs your Google contacts with Thunderbird's address book. Just install the extension, give it your Gmail username and password (it supports both @gmail and Google Apps domains), and hit the Sync Now button to synchronise names, email addresses, phone numbers, IM handles, and more. Zindus does its best to handle any conflicts and walk you through resolutions, but you can also sync the contacts to a separate list if you just want to give it a try. The free, cross-platform Zindus is a fantastic solution for Thunderbird users jealous of Address Book's recent 
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.
We've already shown you how to 
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.
