Email management (for gmail users)

My email inbox used to be crazy. It used to have large amount of emails to be processed later but never gets processed! Many a time important emails got buried in the volume of read and unread emails. I never knew how to manage this issue until I read the Inbox Zeroer article which I happened to read from the posts of Saravananan. Now my inbox containing important emails is almost always empty!!. This is how I achieved it.

1. First of all, I started using Priority Inbox of Gmail. Soon it started categorizing my emails correctly.
2. But the most important was the use of Boomerang for Gmail. It just helped me to implement a simple system devised by Merlin Mann for keeping my email inbox empty. This is how Boomerang helped me.

Boomerang for Gmail

From the Boomerange page,”Boomerang for Gmail is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. It works for Gmail accounts and Google Apps / Hosted Gmail email accounts.”

Now with Boomerang installed, when I get an email I have the following choices:

• I decide that I need to reply only later. Then I select the Boomerang menu and choose when it should “re-appear” in my inbox. It may on the same day, or next day or days or weeks afterwards.  Soon the email disappears from my inbox and re-appears exactly at the time I asked it to re-appear. I may either boomerang my email again or respond to it. The net effect is that the mail disappears from my inbox for the time being.
• Respond immediately.
• Delete it.
• Archive it.

Installation

Get an invitation code from this page and install it in gmail.

How it works

When you snooze an email, boomerang actually moves the email from the inbox and labels it “Boomerang”. The boomerang server keeps the header information and at the required time they move the mail back to our inbox. They say that they do not store the contents of our email.

What if I need to look at an email which I have snoozed for a later date?

Just click the “manage boomerang” menu on the right top of gmail. You can reschedule or move it to the inbox immediately or throw it away.

Sending emails at “appropriate times”

With boomerang installed, it is easy for me to schedule an email to be send later. You write your email, save it and then select the “send later” option. Select the date and time at which you want the email to be sent. I use this feature regularly like this: as myself and my wife are working in two different locations, more than 12 hours apart in time,  I  use this feature to drop emails to my wife’s inbox when she is working (and i am snoring)!