Email Goodies

In my last post, I talked about some problems with the current email clients. In this post I want to share a few improvements I read about recently, as well as some ways I manage my mail that help me to stay productive.

One cool browser add-on is Rapportive (via ReadWriteWeb), which displays a sidebar with additional information about the person you’re conversing with - his picture and info from various social networks. Here’s an example:

The limitation is that only the public info form social networks is shown (even if you’re “friends”), and also it’s less convenient when the correspondence includes several people.

Another interesting Chrome extension is Graph Your Inbox (via Google Operating System), which works with Gmail and gives you stats and insight into your emails usage patterns. Using Gmail search operators you can slice and dice your email history and visualize it.

Here’s an example of the amount of Buzz posts (from me and people I follow) this year:

A more interesting graph is my count of Facebook notifications, which shows a sharp increase in usage in summer 2009:

A recent article talks about many start-ups working in this area, so there are many improvements expected to come.

As far as managing my email, I receive enough email that reading it as it comes would be quite distracting. A few tools in Gmail are very useful to separate those that should be read and acted upon immediately, and those for later.

The first one is Labels and Filters - I have some 30 filters (rules) which label incoming email, and move most of it out of inbox. I label mails from social networks, financial institutions, university and work into a folder hierarchy for easy search later.

Unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t allow using filter rules based on Groups in contacts, so I had to manually construct a query string which matches each of the addressed in the “Friends” group, and label them as such - and those are mails I know come from people I correspond with, rather than some automated service.

Finally, here’s a simple but a useful rule to filter out much of the “funny” email I still receive from some friends and relatives - any email that was forwarded twice is usually junk, and it is moved into a “Fun” folder which I check on once a week:

Matches: subject:("Fw: Fw" OR "Fwd: Fw")

Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label "Personal_Fun"

The last, but not least is the recent “Priority Inbox” that was introduced in Gmail. You should check it out - it’s a great idea, which I use to show three sections in my Inbox: Important mails I haven’t read yet, Starred emails which for me means TODO+Important, and other unarchived mail in Inbox which is basically TODO but not very important.

It takes a little while to train Gmail which mail should be marked as important or not - but it allows me to manage my tasks better as well as ignore unread mail which is not urgent, and that is a great way to reduce distractions.

That’s all for now, you are welcomed to share any interesting ideas about better using your email.