A few years ago a friend that works in PR told me about Streak, an email tracking service that lets you know when someone has opened a message you send them, sometimes with details about where that opening happened and even what device they were on when they were reading it.
Mac: When Spark initially launched on Mac, it had enough features to get by, but it still needed to check off a few boxes to convince power users to give it a look. In an update today, they have added a few new tools for managing your email.
Your phone is probably the device you use for email the most, and Airmail is one of the best iPhone apps to read, reply and organise it. Airmail is all about management through customisation, and while it's fine out of the box, a little tweaking makes it even better.
Mac: Spark, one of our favourite email apps for iPhone and iPad, has made the jump to Mac. Now you can use all of your custom filters, gestures and smart notifications on your laptop or desktop -- and it's still free.
iOS: iOS 10 brought a ton of great new features and opened things up to third-party apps. Airmail, one of the best iPhone email apps, is taking advantage of those new features with an update today.
iOS: Airmail is one of the best email apps on iOS, provided you don't mind spending a little time tweaking it. Today, the app's getting a bunch of new features that push those customisation options even further.
iOS/Mac: You have far too many email apps to choose from on iOS, but if you're still searching for the perfect app for your workflow, Polymail's an app that's worth a look.
iOS: Airmail has long been our favourite email app in the uncluttered market of Mac apps, and yesterday it arrived on the iPhone where it's up against much stiffer competition. While it doesn't have one trick that separates it from the others, it does let you do just about whatever the heck you want with it.
Briefly: Dropbox is shutting down their mobile email client, Mailbox, on February 26. The influential client utilised swipes and gestures to organise emails and was first acquired by Dropbox in 2013. Carousel, Dropbox's photo organisation app, will also be discontinued. Read more on the Dropbox blog.
Android/iOS: Outlook, our favourite email app for iOS, was updated today with some design improvements.That namely includes a new calendar that pulls in the visual and interface style from Microsoft's recently acquired Sunrise Calendar (which happens to be our favourite calendar on iOS too).
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 back in December, when it was still in somewhat rough shape. Now the email-centric task manager and organiser has hit its official 1.0 release, and it's looking a lot better, if still not intuitive when you first open it. The app can connect to, synchronise, and manage a lot of different data types—email, calendars, notes, and appointments—and puts it all in a very GTD-like list in the "Dashboard." Chandler said it had synced up to my Gmail account through IMAP, but I'm still waiting to see the folders it's supposed to create in there. There are lots and lots of menus and sub-menus to dig through, so for the time being, we'll just say it's worth checking out and exploring. Chandler is a free download for Windows, Mac (PPC and Intel), and Linux systems.
Great news for Yahoo Mail users: The big Y has stopped automatically including advertising taglines at the bottom of your email messages. About time!
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 worked for Adam back in the day, but it was a no-go for me.) The futile exercise made me think of just a few features I wish Gmail had built-in, but doesn't. Namely:
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: Previously mentioned Microsoft Outlook plug-in Xobni (pronounced "zob-nee") is now available to the public for immediate download. Previously in invite-only beta, Xobni adds email analytics, better contact cards, fast search, threaded conversations, and more to your Outlook inbox. The NY Times explains one way Xobni makes your inbox more of a social network of connected contacts: Xobni recognises that if an executive sends a copy to someone else on each message he or she sends, it might be to an assistant or another colleague. When someone using Xobni searches for that executive in Outlook, the second person is listed as well. Huh-wha, you ask? Here, have a video demonstration of Xobni in action.
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. Delay the messages you send from Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is the company-issued email client at your place of employment, so like it or not, it's up to you to figure out how to manage your inbox, calendar, and task list every day using it. To make things worse, if you're in IT lockdown without administrator rights to your PC, you can't install special add-ons or software to help your cause. Luckily there are install-free ways to customise Outlook, add keyboard shortcuts, and get your inbox down to zero messages painlessly with a few tweaks to your setup.
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.
