Don’t let email rule your life
Raise your hand if you use email all day, every day. Raise your other hand if you are overwhelmed by email, even with the aide of a mobile device. Most readers will have both hands raised at this point, and for that, we sincerely empathize. Over the years, we have sought out and shared with you many ways to streamline your email so that it doesn’t hurt your productivity, and today, Patrick Merfert at Contactually, a startup that helps you follow up with your most important contacts.
Merfert’s passion is startups, and as a part of the Contactually team, he is well versed in productivity online. Below, he shares his top five free tools to help Gmail users reach inbox zero, the state of zen where there are no unread emails:
1. Unroll.me
“Unroll.me is a powerful yet incredibly simple tool that identifies all of your email subscriptions and allows you to determine you to quickly unsubscribe from unwanted subscription lists. You can run it once and quickly unsubscribe from 100s of subscriptions with a press of a button. Do. It. Now.”
2. Mailstrom
“Mailstrom is a very cool online dashboard that provides a breakout of your crazy inbox by: sender, subject, social, time, lists, and size. For example, you can quickly delete emails over a certain size, older than a certain date. Just like unroll.me, you can even unsubscribe from pesky subscriptions AND delete all the previous messages from that sender.”
3. The Email Game
“The Email Game… gamification of Inbox Zero for the win! When you log-in and link to your Gmail inbox, you race against a clock to decide what to do with each email displayed one by one (such as: delete, label, skip, or reply). If you don’t beat the clock, the happy face will become less happy. You can tweak settings such as number of emails per session”
Read more of AG’s coverage of The Email Game here.
4. OtherInbox
“OtherInbox has a couple of useful products to help manage your inbox: Organizer and Unsubscriber. Organizer automatically sorts certain email into folders such as receipts, newsletters so that you save precious inbox real estate. With unsubscriber, you can easily unsubscribe from subscriptions by dragging email messages to the Unsubsribe folder in your inbox.”
Read more of AG’s coverage of OtherInbox here.
5. FindBigMail
“FindBigMail is a simply tool for quickly finding and then deleting your largest emails. Once installed, the tool establishes filters for your large messages allowing you to determine if you really need to keep that 15mb floating cat video. FindBigMail is essential if you are running out of space in your inbox.”
Stephanie L Davis
July 16, 2012 at 2:12 pm
A clean inbox. Always feels great 🙂
Patrick Merfert
July 17, 2012 at 9:37 am
@Stephanie L Davis I agree! Have you ever used any of the tools that I shared here? Do you have any favorites that were not mentioned?