Put the 'G' in Email: Managing Email with Gmail

‘G’ is for gangsta and when it comes to email, Gmail is straight up gangsta. Google changed the landscape of web-based email when it launched its Gmail service. Before Gmail, it was customary for web-mail providers to offer 2 to 4MB of storage. Google began with a service offering 1GB of storage space and now offers about 7GB. This makes it feasible to store years of mail on Google’s servers as opposed to the traditional method of downloading all mail to a local hardrive.

Most of the big email service providers have followed Google’s lead and now offer large amounts of storage, slick interfaces, calendars and other great features. So why do I stick with Gmail?

Google Apps

Again, some of the other big players have followed suit, but Google was the first major player to offer domain services. Domain services include the ability to use branded email (@yourdomain.com), shared calendars, shared contacts, website features and more. Google is still the only provider out of the bunch (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) to offer these services free (they display ads for revenue).

If you own a small business and you’re still using email addresses like mysmallbusiness@aol.com, it’s time to step your game up a little bit.

Best Friends with Firefox

Firefox is still the best web browser out there. With Firefox being open source, there are thousands of available third-party add-ons to enhance and customize the features of this browser. Many of these extensions enhance the way Firefox and Gmail work together.

Here are some of the Firefox extensions I use to enhance the features of Gmail:

Google Gears – This allows me to store all my mail from Gmail on my local computer, just in case my Internet connection ever goes down. In the event my connection does go down, I can still go to the Gmail website, as usual, and all my email will be there waiting for me.

GTDInbox – Are you a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done? If so, you NEED this. If not, check it out anyway. It allows you to use Gmail’s label feature to organize projects by tasks, status and reference. Since I have been using this add-on, I have been able to keep an empty inbox!

Gmail Notifier – A little icon on my status bar lights up when I get new mail.

DolceGMail – Interfaces with SugarCRM, allowing me to add new leads, emails and contacts straight from my inbox.

Remember The Milk (RTM) for Gmail – Provides access to my task lists through RTM and allows me to create new tasks just by staring an email.

Google is the Pioneer

Google is always coming out with new features for Gmail. Some of the other email providers may incorporate these features into their own offerings, but Google remains ahead of the game for now.

Check out the ‘Labs’ tab under your Gmail settings to see some of the new features that Google is playing around with.

One of my favorites is ‘Canned Reponses’. Though it may be titled ‘email for the truly lazy’, if you get the same kinds of inquiries day after day and always find yourself writing the same responses, check out canned responses. Canned responses allows you to save email templates for later use.

So, check out Gmail… I think you’ll like it. And I can even offer an incentive: If you would like to move your email to Google Apps, I will help you with the process free of charge, just let me know you read about this on Biznik.

Drawbacks

As I was getting ready to send off my newsletter, I noticed Google made some changes to the Gmail user interface. I also noticed that my favorite add-on, GTDInbox, was not working. I checked out the blog on the GTDInbox website and found that Google released a major code upgrade that essentially broke the GTDInbox add-on. The developers at GTDInbox repaired the add-on and released an update within two days. In the meantime, I was able to use Gmail without the add-on. However, this does highlight one of the drawbacks of depending on Gmail and third-party add-ons: you are at the whim of whatever changes Google wishes to implement and have to deal with how these changes may affect your add-ons and email workflow.