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Gmail Adds Drag and Drop Attachments

August 4, 2010 By James View Comments

Gmail is starting to love the drag and drop. It was a little more than a year ago when they added drag and drop functionality to their labels. Earlier this year they added the ability to add attachments to an email by dragging them from your hard drive into your email. Now they’ve added the ability to drag attachments you receive in an email and drop them onto your desktop (or anywhere else you’d like).

I’m a huge fan of Gmail and I’ve used it to manage all of my email for the past 6 years, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I’d like to see Google put some serious time and effort into a major refresh of Gmail, not only with features but with its UI as well. Sure, Gmail raised the bar when it launched back in 2004 but since then it has remained largely stagnant, while Hotmail and Yahoo have been doing major overhauls to their platforms. I’m not holding my breath though.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: attachments, email, gmail, Web Apps

Rapportive Gmail Plugin Gives You Social and CRM Advantage

June 8, 2010 By James View Comments

I get a lot of emails from people I don’t know asking me questions or commenting on a post or looking for a problem solver. Rapportive gives me a leg up, immediately being able to see a little more about the person and who they are. Fortunately for me this makes me look a lot smarter than I am when I can email them back and drop hints about things they may not expect me to immediately know.

There are a lot of new tools out there that claim to help you aggregate your social media contacts. Most of them want you to sign up and enter the details of all the sites you want to aggregate, not too convenient really. That’s what makes Rapportive so convenient, it doesn’t rely on you entering any information, it pulls its info from the email of the person in your inbox. The best part is that Rapportive replaces the ads on the right side of your inbox with all this useful info.

Rapportive works as both a Firefox and a Chrome plugin as well as Mailplane for Macs. Go here using your browser of choice to automatically install the plugin. Believe it or not I’ve already found out some new and useful info about a few of my contacts that I may never have discovered without Rapportive.

Whenever you open an email in from someone Rapportive automatically uses their email address to lookup various social networking sites to give you an idea of who you’re talking to. The plugin also allows you to keep notes on each user, very helpful if you’re getting hundreds of emails a day and dealing with potential clients that you may or may not hear from for long periods of time.

Go ahead, install it and let us know what you think in the comments.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: crm, email, gmail, plugins, rapportive, Social Media

Microsoft Launches New and Improved Hotmail

May 18, 2010 By James View Comments

Since I signed up for my first Hotmail account in 1997 (which I still have) I’ve been a total sucker for webmail. I’m still a sucker for web apps in general so whenever Microsoft does a complete overhaul of one of the world’s first, and most successful, webmail services it’s probably worth taking a look.

The first thing I noticed when going to login to Hotmail was that, once you’re logged in, it takes you straight to your inbox. They’ve gotten rid of that default news type landing page (which I think Yahoo Mail still uses) and gotten back to the basics. Email. If you’re a Hotmail user, that alone is reason to celebrate, but that’s just the gravy.

Conversation View:

If you like Gmail’s threaded conversations then you’ll be a fan of Hotmail’s conversation view. The new Hotmail gives you the option to turn this on and off which is something Gmail doesn’t do. Personally, I don’t understand why all mail apps don’t offer conversation view, it’s a far better way to keep track of your email history.

Office Web Apps Integration:

Microsoft has integrated Office Web Apps and Skydrive into Hotmail. You can now edit documents and presentations right in Hotmail without even having to download them. Hotmail is also using Skydrive to store photos so you can attach and view large photos right in your email app.

Single Contact List:

This may be the coolest new feature in any webmail app out there. “The new Hotmail brings all your online contacts into one convenient place — even those from services like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Send an email to anyone, and if you want to you can manage your contacts by creating categories such as Friends or Co-workers to easily organize your address book.”

Exchange ActiveSync:

Gmail started offering this late last year and it works great for iPhones and Blackberries. I suspect heavy Hotmail users will be just as happy as I was to start using this with their mobile devices.

There’s a lot more new features including the ability to flag, move and manage your emails intuitively based on who they’re from. In the end I have too much invested in gmail to move away now, but I can honestly say that I’m impressed at where Hotmail is headed. This update has been a long time coming and you can really see that Microsoft wanted to make significant, deep changes in hotmail and they have definitely done that. These aren’t minor, cosmetic changes.

But what do I know, all of these changes are live so go login to your old Hotmail account or go sign up for a new one and let me know what you think in the comments section.

Filed Under: Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: email, hotmail, microsoft, Web Apps, webmail

Mozilla Labs working on “Smart” Inbox: Raindrop

October 23, 2009 By James View Comments

Mozilla Labs Thunderbird team is working on new, open source software aimed at making your email life easier by unifying many platforms in one place. Raindrop will use a smart filtering technology to separate the important, personal messages from the background noise of alerts, friend requests, direct message alerts etc. Possibly the most exciting part of this project is that, unlike Thunderbird, Raindrop is a web app.

Mozilla Raindrop

Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that’s no longer the case today. In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, Email, etc. to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages. As a result, we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has overwhelmed by noise which obscures the real messages from real people.

This boosts my argument last week that the email era is far from over. On the contrary, email is still in its infancy and as email grows up we will see more and more apps that will attempt to help you sort out the distractions until you’re ready to access them.

Click after the jump to watch a quick video highlighting some early features of the current Raindrop prototype.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: email, mozilla, open source, raindrop

The Email Era is Far From Over

October 12, 2009 By James View Comments

emailsToday the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The End of the Email Era”. This wreaks of the, “Hey, look at me I said something”, approach that apparently passes for journalism these days.

Jessica E. Vascellaro’s premise is that just as email came into our lives a over a decade ago thanks to sites like Twitter and Facebook, among others, it is now waning fast.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

That would have been like saying, back when email was coming into its own, that it was time to dismantle the United States Post Office and proclaiming it the “end of the snail mail era”.

Twitter and Facebook, among others, may indeed be excellent tools to announce partnerships, and deals that have been struck. They may be outstanding platforms to broadcast to your friends, family or followers that you’re really enjoying the bologna sandwich you’re eating or that you’ll be speaking at Blogworld Expo but they are by no means a replacement for email.

Feelers can’t be put out via Twitter. You can’t work out the final arrangements of a deal on your Facebook feed. The simplicity and privacy of email is exactly what makes its place so secure. While the water cooler may be a great place to brag about your “accomplishments” from your wild night the night before, it’s certainly not the place you’re going to “seal the deal” if you know what I mean.

Hilariously enough, at the end of Vascellaro’s article is the classic: —Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com. What? No Twitter username or Facebook profile?

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: communication, email, facebook, Social Media, twitter, wall street journal

Fixing Gmail’s IMAP on iPhones running 3.0

August 29, 2009 By James View Comments

Not long after upgrading to version 3.0 on my iPhone I began to notice that my Gmail IMAP began being unresponsive. In other words, actions I would take on the iPhone wouldn’t show up on the web. It’s pretty frustrating to go through and archive and organize all of your messages on your iPhone only to log into your web account later and see that none of it is actually reflected.

Apparently the key for people using firmware version 3.0 is to delete your current Gmail setup and start fresh choosing “other” on the setup screen rather than “Gmail”.

It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than what it was before. You can see the full setup directions via Gmail Help after the jump. This is definitely a step forward, but come on Gmail, you can do better than this.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: email, gmail, IMAP, iPhone, mobile, Tips
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