Web Worker Daily

Do you ever stop to consider the fact that you probably see your e-mail application more than you see members of your family? It’s a big time sink for web workers. In this post, I’ll round up six tools–including applications for the Mac, Windows and Linux–that you can get for free and boost your e-mail efficiency with.

Set the Rules. If you use Mac OS X, definitely give Mail Act-On a try. It’s a free plug-in and it gives you much more control and efficiency over how you process e-mail. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to Mail rule actions and filters. These are particularly handy for moving messages or having them automatically categorized. The program has a menu of available actions you can work with, and you can create your own.

E-Mail in Your Pocket. Qm is a free download for Windows users that lets you hop in and out to send quick e-mails on the fly. It’s much faster than, say, starting Microsoft Outlook and composing a message. You can also add Qm to the Windows Explorer Send To menu to mail files quickly. The program’s footprint is also very tiny, so you can carry it on a USB key if you want a mail client wherever you are.

Spread Out Your G-Mail. For users of Firefox and G-Mail, give the free GMail Manager plug-in a try. It lets you manage multiple GMail accounts from one location and open separate accounts in separate tabs. You can use it to get an overview of everything from unread messages to saved drafts across your various accounts.

Tiny E-Mail Suite. i.Scribe is a nice little mash-up of a quick, small e-mail client, a calendar and a contact database. It’s much faster to use on the fly than, say, GMail or Outlook, and downloads are free for Windows, Mac and Linux versions. The e-mail client has a built-in Bayesian spam filter, and the footprint of the program is less than one megabyte, so, like Qm above, you can carry it anywhere on a USB key.

Who Got Back to Me? For users of Microsoft Outlook, E-Mail Follow-Up is a slick, downloadable add-in application that reminds you to send follow-up e-mails if you haven’t gotten a reply back in a pre-specified amount of time. It’s surprising how useful this turns out to be, and most people solve the problem by just regularly trying to jog their memories as to who they have messages out to. This program does the jogging for you. Note though, that if you want to use the program completely free of charge, you have to do some limited product trials from the parent company, Mapi Labs’ partners.

Video Mail. Also for users of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft offers a free download that lets you easily send video e-mails. You can take a video straight from your webcam to the application very quickly.

Do you have any good tips on tools for boosting e-mail efficiency?