Hi there.
Steve Dotto here.
I am glad youíre joining me today.
Today, three apps that you need to know to add on to Gmail to make your life that much
better.
Gmail has become for me my staple tool for all email.
As a matter of fact, I use it as my main email client and youíll find lots of videos where
I talk about that online.
Iíve converted over from using any dedicated email client.
There are some benefits to that but there are also some limitations to using Gmail as
your main email client.
One of the cool things is there are so many different add-ons that you can add to the
functionality of Gmail if you do a little bit of searching around.
Now Iím going to show you today three of what I consider to be essential add-ons, my
three current favorites.
Now I am slightly fickle and my favorites change from time to time but I think every
time that Iíve thought about this particular topic, the same favorite one has been my favorite
one to start.
Letís begin with it and that is a cool called Rapportive.
Now what is Rapportive?
Rapportive is a little Gmail add-on that we put in that gives us contextual information
about whomever we happen to be communicating with at that time.
So what Iíve done here is Iíve just opened up an email about an event thatís coming
up and do you see here on the right-hand side where there are normally ads from Gmail?
What Rapportive does is it gives us contextual information about the individual that we are
communicating with.
So if I start a fresh email and I type in a personís name, their information will appear
here.
Or if Iím reading an existing email, their information appears here.
So here we have Paul.
Iíve got his email address, where he works.
Iíve got basically his contact information that appears here.
Thatís good but better than that are these additional pieces of information.
It tells me first of all, where Iím connected with him.
Iím following him on Twitter.
We are connected on LinkedIn.
Obviously, we do a lot together.
I have him in Google Plus.
As well, if I click hereóthis is probably my favorite part of the Rapportive toolkitóif
I click here on Recent Mail, it shows me all of the recent emails thatís gone back and
forth that Paul has been a part of.
Isnít that a terrific tool?
Just think about what that gives you.
How often have you gone searching through?
Youíve been writing an email to somebody.
Youíve started to put their email address and youíve started to write away to them
and you go, oh gee, what did they say in that email?
So now youíre going out of the email and youíre going back and youíre searching.
This is a way that you can find all of that contextual information in one place.
If you want to make notes on a person, if you want to use it as a little bit of a customer
relationship management thing, you just click on Add a Note and I can start adding notes
to a person.
You could also ask it to feed through their status updates and other things from the other
social networks that you attach to them.
So all in all for me, Rapportive is probably the one essential Gmail add-on that I think
everybody should be adding.
And itís free!
How do they make money?
Well, thatís a darn good question.
Well, they were bought by LinkedIn so it may not be as important to them to make money
right now.
But if you take a look at the Rapportive site, their landing page, where you go to download
it and to set it up and to get information at Rapportive.com, you will find if you scroll
down to the bottom, theyíve got a series of different add-ons.
They call them Rapplets and theyíre little add-ons and most of these are charged for.
So if you want to integrate MailChimp or some of theseóactually, some of these are pretty
cool like BookingBug.
It actually allows you to create a little widget on your site or in your email that
allows people to book time with you.
Itís great if youíre doing customer service or things where people will want to book time.
So it works on a corporate level as well.
And if you think about tying in with knowing who is talking on the other side, itís a
fairly natural fit.
So theyíve got some additional tools here that they finally charge for.
But for all of us, Rapportive for Gmail ñ free.
Itís one I definitely think you should be trying and using on a regular basis.
Well, youíll start to use every time, every email you have.
The next tool we have talked about in the past as well and itís called Boomerang.
Now what does Boomerang do?
when we install Boomerang, it installs and allows us to createójust like the word says,
boomerangóit allows us to return emails to us at an appropriate time.
Here is the main way that I use Boomerang.
If I am replying to somebody or sending an email to somebody about something that is
time sensitive or that I want to know that they are following up on, what I do is I set
up a Boomerang rule that says if I havenít heard back from this person on this email
in two days, three days, four days, then return this to my Inbox to remind me to contact them
again.
So itís a little bit of a customer relationship management tool again but what it does is
it allows us to basically trust Boomerang to remind us at an appropriate time of a task
that is incomplete and thatís usually a communication task.
So it works great from that perspective.
I really think itís well conceived and well thought out.
So if you use the Boomerang from the Menu here, you can go through and you can choose
this email and you can have it return to our Inbox at any particular time.
Actually, I should back up.
If Iím composing an email and I send it out, I can ask it to boomerang in two days if I
havenít heard from them.
Where itís even more valuable is when you receive an emailómaybe not more valuable
but as valuableófrom somebody that youíre not ready to deal with at some point.
You can say Iíve got to wait for some more information to come on this.
Instead of leaving this in my Inbox and having it bug me, disappear but come back in a day,
come back in two days, come back next week and then I should have the additional information
so I can deal with it.
So itís a way to park emails that you have to deal with and bring them back in.
It avoids you having to put them into your calendar or use some other system for trying
to remind you, to tickle you to remind you that you have a responsibility.
Boomerang is free to try and you get a certain number of free messages that will return to
your Inbox using Boomerang with a free account.
And then if you decide that you like it, I think itís really reasonably priced.
Itís like $5 for individuals there.
For personal use, for an unlimited number of messages itís like $5 a month so a very
good value for a tool that if you integrate into your workflow, you will find to be tremendously
valuable.
The final one is a new one.
Iíve never talked about this tool before but hereís why I discovered it.
if I scroll down to the bottom of my Gmail Inbox, I have started to use Gmail now for
all of my email so I follow everything into it and Iím using the Archive features in
email to keep track of all my email.
Now I donít want to buy more space on Google if I can avoid it.
Right now if I take a look at how much space Iím using up, Iím using 2.3 GB of 15 GB
so Iím using about 15% of my available space which is Iím in pretty good shape as far
as backing up my email.
But what happens if that email inbox, that Archive, is starting to get larger and larger
and larger and I donít have space or Iím worried that Iím going to run out of space?
Well, I can spend on it and I can buy additional server space from Google, which is an option,
or I can go through and clean up large attachments which take up massive amounts of space because
we often forget that weíre archiving larger attachments when we do our Archives.
But how do I find those large attachments.?Well, this cool called Find Big Mail does it for
us.
Itís a pretty cool tool.
All you do is you go to FindBigMail.com, you put in your Gmail address and itís free if
you have a Gmail account.
They charge you if you have a Google account with your own custom name.
So @dottotech.com, Iíll have to pay to use that, $19 a year for a one email account.
But if itís a Gmail account, itís free so most of you are going to be able to try it
and use it for free.
You put in your Gmail address and then what happens is they send you an email, they do
a scan of your email and they send you this result email that comes back and tells you
how big your messages are, how much space is being used by different messages.
So it works pretty well from that perspective.
But then I noticed that they actually do a little bit more than that.
Iím not sure I love this or not.
They are one of the apps that installs additional mailboxes in my mailbox and I donít like
this because Iíve installed so many different apps over the years that Iíve just got this
huge list of different kind of folders here in the area.
But having said that, Iíve started to use this one and it works for me.
Look what they tell us here.
They tell us, first of all, if I go into this folder here, itís my biggest, my top six
attachments.
These are the largest attachments I have in my email system, in my inbox or in my archive.
If I go here, here are the ones that are greater than 1 MB in size.
Here are all the attachments that are greater than 5 MB in size and here are all the attachments
that are greater than 10 MB in size.
Now I can use this to clean up and recapture space but itís also tremendously useful when
youíre going in and youíre quickly looking for something.
Say somebody sent me an attachment on something, you can just quickly go in and see only your
emails that have attachments.
So it does a great job of sorting from that perspective as well.
Itís called Find Big Mail.
The pricing as I say is $20 a year for a single account.
Thatís if itís not an @Gmail.com.
If itís @Gmail.com, it is free which is I think just a tremendous bargain.
So there, as of today, are my three favorite Gmail add-ons.
Youíve got your Rapportive, youíve got your Boomerang and youíve got your Find Big Mail.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
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you think?
Iím Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
[END OF VIDEO 3 Gmail Add-Ons You Need to Use 10:35]