Email: Inbox Upgrade Tools

The email service has been around even before the internet was born. It has been said that email was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. People use it to pass messages from one computer to another. It is also known as our online identity. All internet users have their own emails. It’s the one thing that identifies us in the online world. The most widely used service in the internet.


Today, email is used not only for sending text based messages. As you may all know, it’s been used for sending images and videos across the internet. It can also be used as an online storage for backing up files. With the functionality of email continually evolving, it is good to know that third party developers are now creating email upgrades to make our inboxes better.

Here is a list of some of the most recent and useful email add-ons that you can use to create a more efficient inbox.

Xobni
Xobni is an email client plugin currently available to Outlook which features quick e-mail searches, quick attachment discovery, automatic extraction of phone numbers, automatic schedule creator and email conversation threading. It basically turns your Outlook into an email based social network.

The Xobni team recently announced that they are integrating their Outlook plugin with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals. Xobni will automatically display a contact’s Linked in profile along with job title, employer and photo. This is a great addition to Xobni’s usefulness when it comes to easily profiling email addresses and quickly displaying professional backgrounds and photos of the owner of the email address in your inbox.

Better Gmail 2 Firefox Plugin
Better Gmail 2 is the latest version of Better Gmail Firefox plugin which compiles the best Greasemonkey user scripts for Gmail into a single package. They upgraded the plugin since Gmail’s interface overhaul. What it does is add a menu of optional extra features to the new version of Gmail.

Xoopit
Xoopit is another Firefox plugin which turns your Gmail into a multimedia management tool. It indexes attachments in your inbox including the link to photos and videos. It will display media from Flickr, Picasa Shutterfly, Kodak and YouTube. This will allow easier searching of images and video links buried in your inbox. You can also filter by sender, or search by keywords associated with videos even if the content sent to you was just the link to the video. The service also allows you to post directly from your inbox to your blogs and Facebook account.

This is a great application and a great upgrade for Gmail. However, the only thing that concerns me is that in order to use Xoopit, you must provide it with your Gmail username and password. I did try it in the Gmail account that I use to subscribe to email RSS. It does the job that it was made to do and it’s a really cool app. If you are not too concerned with handing out your username and password to a third party application then you will find this particular tool of great use.

Gmail Labs
The Gmail team recently released Gmail Labs. They are a set of experimental scripts and add-ons for Gmail which you can enable and disable in your Gmail Settings. You can also send a feedback regarding the usefulness of the add-on. This will enable the team to collaborate with real users for the development of better features for the email service.

You may have noticed that most of the tools listed above are for Gmail. They are chosen because Gmail is the most popular free email service out there. If you have other email upgrades that you want to share with us, please let us know in your comments.