Even though there are is a lot written about different ways to use Google’s web-based email, it is ever evolving and always something to talk about. Plus, everyone has different ways of using the features. This makes for endless possibilities for you to turn it into your ultimate email program.

Priority inbox

I have to admit, I was not a fan of the priority inbox at first. The problem came from me always feeling like I was missing emails. The truth was, Google was doing its best to figure out what was important to me. After a good bit of training, it sorts things beautifully.

How it works is, it looks to see who you converse with via email. It also watches to see what you open and what you trash without opening. From this point, it’s kind of guesses. You can help Google out by marking emails as important or not important. After a while your Priority inbox will be scary accurate.

I use this as my inbox on my Android. It helps me get what is important while mobile and lets the other stuff wait till I am in front of the computer.

Multiple Inboxes

If you need to keep track of multiple email accounts, there are a couple ways to make it easier. One of those ways is to use the Gmail Lab feature Multiple Inboxes. In the article, you are shown how to add different addresses as separate inboxes. You can also do the same thing using Operators for labels or a specific incoming email address or anything else you can think of.

This is done by adding is:pending as the search query box. This will pull of the emails you have labeled as Pending into an inbox off to the side of your main inbox.

Canned responses

Canned responses are like out of the office replies. The beauty of them is you can have a bunch of canned responses, not just one. You can type up a whole FAQ email for a product you are selling. Use this canned response in conjunction with a Gmail filter and you may save a lot of repetitive emails.

You can use them as an email template, a FAQ reply, or something you can modify easily like a cover letter for sending your resume. Use your imagination and I am sure you can come up with a 101 uses for canned responses.

Message Sneak Peek

*If you are using Multiple inboxes, this feature does not operate as intended.
By right clicking on a message in your inbox, you will be able to preview the message without opening it. This is great for when you are scanning your email or an important message.

Nested Labels

If you are one that needs to use sub-folders, Nested labels is what you are looking for. Once the Lab feature is enabled, you can create sub-folders and sub-sub-folders and even sub-sub-sub-folders if you’d like.

Click on the box to the right of a label and look for Add sublabel to create a new nested label.

Send & Archive

If you are replying to a message that you have already labeled and archived, you can type up your reply and press the Send and archive button if you have this Lab enabled. By sending an email this way instead of simply pressing send, you will save yourself a step or two by not needing to go back and file away the email thread again.

Background Send

Background Send is a newer Lab that I just found. It didn’t occur to me how much time I was spending waiting for an email to send. This Lab feature lets you move on to the next task at hand while the email sends in the background. Simple yet very cool.

Custom keyboard shortcuts

If you use Gmail a lot, it may be a good idea to set up some custom keyboard shortcuts to help you make repetitive tasks a little easier. There are a lot of them in the list that can offer a lot of time saving. One of my favorite is “Shift-t” which add the conversation to Tasks. I can easily reference the email that spawned the task.

If you would prefer to have it be Shift-a, you can change it to be easier for you to remember. Don’t try to remember too many new shortcuts at one time or you may get overwhelmed and abandon them all together.

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong combination of Lab features,all that matters is how it works for you. NO matter how many productivity techniques you add to your day, it all comes down to focus. Try a few of these and let us know what you think.

Tell us how you handle the huge pile of emails you get everyday in the comments below.

image Kinologik

An even more common question is, how do you handle your inbox and get things done while you are not in the office?

Below are a few tips and applications to better help you manage your email from an Android phone while out of the office.

In your inbox

Folders

The first thing you will want to do is setup folders. If you are using Gmail, they are called labels. Setting up folders will help you keep things separated and make messages a little easier to find. In addition to using labels, filters for your emails will also help keep things sorted.

When working from your Android phone, it is easy to see the label attached to the email message if there is one.

IMAP

Using IMAP instead of POP will give you much greater control over how you can handle your email. With most POP setups, when you handle an email on your phone, your desktop application doesn’t know about it. And with syncing messages, the best you can do is download and delete the messages from the email server.

If you are using something like Thunderbird or Outlook to manage your email, you may be okay with not having your filters and folders synced with the server. What if your company decides to switch desktop email programs? You will likely have to redo all of that hard work to re-organize everything.

If you use IMAP, your email server, desktop application and phone will all be in sync. You will be able to access the messages in all of your folders, move those messages from one folder to another and generally save yourself time when you get back to your computer.

Forward emails to one account

If you have several email accounts you manage, here is a link to an article on how to send and receive non-Gmail emails from Gmail. Having one spot to check all of your emails can be vital in keeping your inbox at bay.

Applications

Many times an application to can easily add all of the functionality you are looking for. Below is an alternative email application that offers more than the pre-installed Android email application. With the help of a couple add-ons, it walks all over the pre-installed app.

K-9 email

K-9 is a replacement email application for Android phones. Depending on the version of the Android OS and the make and model of device, the layout may look similar. In testing it though, it runs much faster and has more options to configure how it handled your incoming mail.

K-9 Data Killer

K-9 Data Killer lets you turn off the syncing if you use K-9. This add-on application would do the same thing as going into your Android settings and turning on and off the automatic sync for Gmail.

Email pop-up

Email pop-up is another email add-on for K-9 email. What it does is show a pop-up for incoming emails. While this seems like it is more like a frivolous application that just takes up space, it is actually really useful.

Picture yourself having a really busy day and you are waiting for an important email. Instead of opening K-9 each time an email arrives, you can see who it’s from and a little bit of the text. Having these little pop-ups can actually save you a lot of time and battery by not needing to access your email application just to see who it is and what they want.

These are only a few of the vast number of applications and tips for handling email efficiently. Everyone has their own methods that work well for them, but many people struggle daily with their inbox. It never hurts to try a small change to see if it will improve your email productivity.

Leave a comment with your best email usage tip or favorite application.

image credit: RambergMediaImages

Flexamail is an email sevice, yet it is not the email service that you use to check for mail everyday. Sound confusing? To make it more explicit, Flexamail is a web service that can send your Web content, Twitter or Facebook update to your personal inbox. All you need to do is to send an email to the respective Flexamail email account and it will automate the process for you.

Signing up

Flexamail is a personalize service, so you will need to sign up an account with them. You will need to sign up with your primary email address (or the email that you will be regularly accessing. My advise, don’t use your office email). This email address will be the primary tool you use to communicate with Flexamail.

Using Flexamail

There are several ways that you can make good use of Flexamail. You can:

• Access popular sites like Twitter and Facebook all from your email without needing a proxy
• Avoid pesky firewalls getting in your way, access websites and services regardless to your office or country’s firewall settings
• Post, share and track any type of files and images online
• Password protect those files you don’t want made public
• Securely backup your files online
• Save money on your cellphone plan with an email only data plan
• Publish a photo from your iPhone or Blackberry without needing to open an app
• Stay organized with sortable, sharable, drag and drop lists

To be able to access your Twitter and Facebook account, you will first need to give permission to Flexamail to access your account.

To receive update for your Twitter or Facebook account, all you have to do is to send a blank email (from the email address that you signed up Flexamail with) to twitter@flexamail.com or facebook@flexamail.com respectively.

It will then reply you with a mail consisting all the updates in your Twitter/Facebook account.

Similarly, you can send email to facebookwall@flexamail.com to post to your Facebook wall, tweet@flexamail.com to send a tweet, and many other Twitter related services.

Surfing the Web

To surf the web with Flexamail, you can send an email to www@flexamail.com and insert the Website URL as the subject of the email. You will then receive an email of the website you wish to view.

Need to perform a search on Google? No worry, just send a mail to google@flexamail.com with the search terms as the subject.

You can also add your favorite sites (up to 4) to Flexamail and get it to retrieve content from those sites with the email favs@flexamail.com

Other services

Other services provide by Flexamail include uploading and storing your files (including encrypted files) and images and also creating a to-do list. More features will also be added in the near future.

Conclusion

Flexamail will be slow and redundant if you have full access to the web. But if you are in an office environment where (almost) everything online is blocked, except for your email address, then Flexamail will be a good way to continue to keep in touch with the Web.

Flexamail

What if you could have help? There is an application out there that will go through your inbox and sort out known email marketing lists and social media emails. OtherInbox helps solve this dilemma.

What OtherInbox does

When you first grant OtherInbox access to your Gmail inbox, it analyzes all of the senders. Many of them are “known” by the system and can be categorized. Social sites, credit cards, entertainment sites like Hulu and Boxee are just a few it filters.

Getting started

To get started, go to OIB.com. You will see a spot to choose Gmail (and Google apps), Yahoo or Other. Other isn’t available, they will notify you when other services are available. I had great success with both Gmail and Google Apps. I couldn’t get Yahoo to work.

Once you sign into and grant access to your Gmail account, OtherInbox will start to scan your inbox. If you have a lot of emails saved, this process can take a while. The good thing is, you don’t need to be logged in to either your email or OtherInbox for it to do its thing.

Senders

As OtherInbox sifts through the mess you have left in your inbox, it will look at all of the senders. If one of the senders is not in the known database, you can add it. All you need to do to add a new sender to be filtered is add it to the OIB label. From that point forward, the new sender will be filtered into the appropriate category.

Social sharing

In the settings, you can input your Twitter and Facebook login credentials. Doing this will let you post your purchases to your social network.

Shipment tracking

This is a feature I have not seen too much of. OtherInbox will add your package shipping dates to your Google calendar. You simply import the calendar file to your Google calendar and it will be updated when new emails arrive with a delivery date.

OIB.me

This is a neat feature. OIB.me is a review site for mailing lists. If you are thinking of joining a mailing list, you can see what others think of it. Do they send too many emails, are there lots of coupons, etc.

Conclusion

As you can see, OtherInbox is a bit more than an inbox manager. It simplifies things. Not only can it save time, you will also feel less out of control when you look at your email.

During the time I was setting up OtherInbox, I tried the Help link and searched around other parts of the site. There was a bit of a struggle to get information in the help section. Everything seemed to point to the OIB.me page. While helpful, it didn’t answer basic how to use OtherInbox questions.

What would your ideal email organizer do for you and what would you want to still do yourself?

One of the problems with Emails is the ability to share it publicly or to share it with strangers who are not in your contact list. Say you are a web developer and received a project deal, which you want to forward to your team members. You can either add a Cc or forward it to the group of people. But the problem here is the email message is not public and only those people who have received a forwarded copy can read it.

There are some workarounds in these situations. You may copy the entire email message and publish it as a webpage. Then shorten the URL and share it on your website, blog or social profiles. Another alternative would be to use Cc:everybody – a web service which allows you to share email messages publicly.

How Cc:Everybody Works

When you create a new account with Cc:Everybody, you will get a public email address e.g “yourusername@Cc:Everybody.com“. When other people send messages to this public email address, a copy of the message will be forwarded to your real email address – the one which you used to sign up for Cc:Everybody.

When you want to share an email publicly with anyone, just send a reply to the email message at yourusername@Cc:Everybody.com. That’s it – your message will be published as a publicly accessible webpage which anyone can view. You can further share the webpage on your social profiles e.g Facebook, Twitter and so on.

When readers read your public email, they can respond to it and the message will be sent to your original email account. You post a reply and your reply is again made public at your Cc:Everybody.com profile page. All published emails will be available on http://cceverybody.com/username- this is your public inbox.

Setting Up Your Cc:Everybody Public Email Inbox

1. First, head over to the Cc:everybody and sign up for a new account. Be sure to associate your primary email address where you receive important emails.

2. You will receive a confirmation link to your email address. Click that to activate your account.

3. Once your account is activated, you will get a public email inbox. Here is how it looks:

4. Right after this, you will receive a demo email from the Cc:everybody team. Simply send a reply and your message will be published on your Cc:everybody  mailbox page.

5. Head over to your Cc:everybody profile and you will see the email conversation as a public webpage. Here is how it looks:

6. Now that you have familiarized yourself with the working of Cc:everybody, go to the settings page and  customize your settings. You can change your account password, toggle approving comments and replies, connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to auto publish replies and more.

Working With Cc:Everybody and Sharing Email Conversations

Starting a new conversation:

If you want to start a new public conversation with anyone, click the “New Conversation” link at the sidebar. This will open a small WYSIWYG editor, where you can compose your message, add images, links and publish it. The message can also be forwarded to individual email address(s) and the discussion will be sent in your Cc:Everybody profile page. Here is an example:

Alternatively, you can send a new email to “postoffice@cceverybody.com” and the message will be published at your Cc:everybody profile.

Now this is very useful because your friends who have not joined Facebook or Twitter yet, can take part in the conversation. They don’t have to sign up or register for a new account. All they have to do is head over to the conversation page and submit a new comment using the Discus comment box.

Request User’s to Send you a Direct Message

If you want other users to email you without knowing your email address, Cc:Everybody is just as capable of acting as an email alias. When user’s go to your Cc:Everybody profile page, they can send a direct message to your original email address. This is useful, because the email address is not shared with unknown people and you can still receive a reply from them.

Adding Contacts, Managing Labels, RSS Feeds and Deleting previous Threads

You can create a contact list in your Cc:everybody inbox. This contact list is accessible only to you and not made public, unlike the email conversations.

Individual messages can be labelled for quick search and you can delete previous messages to keep your public inbox in healthy shape. Other user’s can subscribe to the RSS feed of your public emails and get updates directly from their feed reader.

Overall, I am really impressed with the concept and implementation of a public inbox. Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The problem is, if your inbox contains 7Gb of emails (probably tens of thousands of them), it can be a tedious and difficult task to sort out which emails take up the most space and can be deleted. This is where Find Big Mail is useful.

Find Big Mail, as the name implies, is a web app that scan your Gmail inbox for large mail and mark them with a label. You can then sort your mail by the label and get instant result of the emails that are taking up all your storage space. The concept is simple, but it is tremendously useful.

Usage

1. Go to findbigmail.com.

2. Enter your Gmail address and click “CLICK HERE”.

3. It will then ask you for permission to access your account. Click “Grant”.

4. Find Big Mail will then proceed to scan your Gmail Inbox and check the emails with big attachment. This will take from several minutes to an hour, depending on your mailbox size. Meanwhile, you can go and take a cup of coffee.

When Find Big Mail finished scanning, it will send you a summary email.

5. To sort your big email, simply type “label:my-big-mail” to the search field to view your mails of size between 100,000 and 500,000 bytes.

Similarly you can type “label:my-really-big-mail” or “label:my-ultra-big-mail” to view emails of size more than 500,000 bytes (~5MB).

Now that they are sorted out, all that you need to do is to delete away those unwanted big size emails to free up the storage space. (You may want to backup your emails before you delete them away).

What’s your take on this? Do you find such a simple app useful?

The other day I was scanning my Twitter stream and someone mentioned Syphir. Like I do most of the time, I bookmarked it until I got home. When I took a look at it and watched the demos, I was pretty excited at the addition control it adds to Gmail’s filters.

How it’s different

Right out of the box Gmail can sort incoming emails into folders or labels by sender, recipient, subject or if the email does or does not have a particular keyword.

For some people, these are not enough. What Syphir adds is more ways to filter incoming messages. Some of those new options are: number of recipients, arrival time and reply probability.

How to use it

Using Syphir is just as easy as using Gmail’s built in filters. To use these, go to Syhpir.com and sign in with either your Gmail or your Google Apps email address.

From the Syphir log in page, you are taken to your actual Gmail or Google Apps log in page.

Once you sign in, you are taken back to the Syphir site. If you want to look at a few samples before you dive in and make your own rules, a link with examples are provided. Otherwise, click on the big blue Create New Rule button.

Creating rules

Creating a rule is a two step process. You have a condition and an action. The combination of the two is where you can really get specific with how your inbox handles your email.

Conditions

These are things like who the email is from, to, if there is an attachment or what time the email arrives to you.

Choose all that apply to the incoming emails you want to target.

Actions

These what is done with the targeted email. Most of these are similar to the normal Gmail options. However, there are a couple additions; Remove Label, Alert iPhone, and Delay Email are the new choices.

The result

Using a combination of conditions and actions you can do things like, postpone work emails until first thing Monday morning. You can also sort all emails into a label based on the likelihood you need to reply.

Are you seeing how useful this could be? If you add a little creativity to creating some of the rules, you can really master your inbox.

Here is a sample rule I made up.

This rule will basically deliver any emails from my fictitious boss received on the weekend to me at 8:15 am on Monday. You could also make up a rule that postpones any forwarded emails from family and friends until you are on your own time.

Having this additional flexibility is can really open up the doors for some creative filters. Just don’t spend too much time trying to create overly complicated rules or it my be a little counter productive.

What tips do you have for taming your inbox?

Previously we have discussed how to access Gmail on your desktop and some Gmail search tips to effectively manage your email overload. This tutorial describes how you can use Multiple inboxes- a Gmail labs feature, that lets you check all your email’s at one place. You may have 5 or 6 email accounts but you can check all the incoming mails from your primary  email account at Gmail.

Following are the steps involved to link all your Gmail accounts and check email at one place:

1. Open your primary email account in Gmail. You would like to receive emails from all your other Gmail accounts here. Go to Gmail labs by clicking the green icon next to settings.

2. In the labs page that opens, scroll down until you find “Multiple inboxes” in the left pane. Select the radio button “Enabled” and hit “Save changes”.

3. Now sign out of your primary email account and login to your other email accounts one by one (let’s call it secondary email accounts). You will forward a copy of all incoming emails from these secondary email accounts to your primary email account. You would read the emails in primary email and even reply to messages from the primary email account only.

4. To enable forwarding of incoming emails, just login to your secondary email account. Go to Settings and select the “Forwarding and Pop/IMAP“ tab. After that select the radio button that says “Forward a copy of the incoming mail to” and put the email address of your primary account there.

5. Repeat the same step for all your secondary email account’s. Also do not forget to archive the email’s copy in the respective accounts. This way, you can always access them later and they do not get lost.

6. After you have configured all your email accounts to send a copy of the incoming mail, log in to your primary email account again.

7. Go to Settings and enable IMAP. You will find the IMAP settings under “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

8. Switch to the “Multiple inboxes” tab in the same page. Put all your secondary email addresses in the search query panes and give each pane a suitable title. Let us assume that your secondary email addresses are: harry@gmail.com, robert@gmail.com, mary@gmail.com, santa@gmail.com. Put all these email addresses in the search query pane as shown below

9. In the next pane choose how many conversation you would want to see listed in each of the mail accounts you added above. While you can use any number but it is advisable to keep it under 5.

10. We are almost done. Choose the position where you want to show the different inboxes. I prefer keeping the inboxes in the right so that i can keep an eye on the incoming messages without having to scroll down.

Here is how the email inbox looks after activating multiple inboxes in Gmail:

There you go. From now on, you will now get all the emails in your primary email account. Here is a wonderful screen cast that describes the above tutorial:

Let me know whether you were able to activate the multiple inbox feature in Gmail or not. Also check out some useful Gmail labs features to increase your email productivity.