I bloody love Gmail.

Yes, it’s buggy. Yes, it has a habit of crashing occasionally. But I love that I can route all my other email addresses from it. I love that I can choose the layout of my Gmail, and route around those pesky sale emails that suck me into a browsing vortex. Most of all, I love that there are so many options for customising your experience.

Here are three of my favourites.

(Prefer to listen to this post? Here’s the podcast!)

Mixmax

Mixmax is like Gmail on caffeine. It’s a plugin that adds a lot more functionality to emails, including:

• Saving templates for future use. I use this to save my coaching agreements and the responses I use often.
• Add in your availability, polls, slideshows, surveys and loads of other cool bits
• Track opening and clicking rates of emails
• Schedule emails for the future
• Links added to emails will be embedded as a lovely clickable box

It’s only on the browser version rather than mobiles sadly, but to be honest the functions I would use are the ones I tend to use during a big ‘sit at my desk and plough through my inbox’ session.

Email Game

When my email has got too much, Email Game is my first stop. Login with your gmail and you can race through your emails, with a time limit for each email. You can respond, archive or boomerang items back into your inbox at a later time/date. Below is a quick video to show how it works.

Gamify your inbox? Yes please

Unroll.me

Ok, I know everyone goes on about Unroll.me. But in case you haven’t, and have an inbox full of subscriptions that make you develop a moderate to severe eye twitch, get yourself Unrolled. Essentially, you login with your Gmail or Hotmail and choose which subscriptions you want in your daily roll up of emails (you’ll get a daily summary of them). They’ll then go straight into a sub folder, which you can visit anytime if you wish, and all the important stuff will sit in your inbox.

What tools do you use with Gmail?