Tag Archives: manage email

February 28, 2013, 11:00 am

Mailbox for iOS Offers a New Metaphor for Managing Emails

If you keep up with tech journalism at all, you may have heard about the new Mailbox app for iOS, which has garnered significant buzz lately as a forward-thinking email client for the mobile age. The app’s website promises to help users “put email in its place”: “We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button. It’s a whole new inbox.”

I managed to get an invitation to the service last week (which is in very limited beta—more on their waitlist later) and have been using it over the weekend. I wanted to write up my initial impressions, with a more detailed post to come.

There are many things I like very much about Mailbox:

Mailbox’s UI is truly gorgeous. Mailbox feels like a modern email…

January 31, 2013, 8:00 am

Chasing Inbox Zero

By Anastasia Salter

Earlier this week I hit the long-elusive inbox zero. The feeling lasted for about five glorious minutes before another project showed up, but it gave me the confidence that at least I haven’t been neglecting any digital fires.

How did I get out from under my previous email backlog? I tried out EmptyInbox, an app that’s designed for quickly reviewing Gmail on iOS devices. Currently, it doesn’t work with other platforms, and the free version includes at times distracting ads. But the app itself isn’t as important as the behavior it inspires. It’s not an email client, as it’s designed only for a simple set of tasks:

Read a quick excerpt of an email (with no option to click and read more)
Choose to leave in inbox, archive, star, label and/or trash (for automatic labeling and archiving, check out Amy’s tips for using Gmail filters)
Repeat until only urgent emails are left in …

August 4, 2011, 8:23 am

Receive Files in Google Docs with GoFileDrop

By Jason B. Jones

Managing files–including student papers–digitally has many advantages, but you still have to get them. If you use a CMS like Blackboard or Moodle, students can submit files that way, and if you have a Dropbox account, students can put things in a public folder, or use a service like Send to Dropbox (covered previously).

For people who have a Google-centered workflow, or who use Google Docs as an external drive, a new service called GoFileDrop might be appealing. GoFileDrop is an add-on to Gmail that gets attachments out of your e-mail and directly into Google Docs.

(As always, in discussions of cloud-based solutions, the general disclaimers in George’s “Stability and Security in the Cloud” post apply.)

Once you give GoFileDrop permission to write to your Google Docs account, it gives you a URL that you can forward to anyone who wants to send you a file. That URL gives…

March 30, 2011, 3:00 pm

Managing Email While on Leave

By Brian Croxall

Last week I was chatting with a colleague about her upcoming year’s leave from not only her teaching but also her administrative position. She is understandably thrilled to have some time to focus on long-gestating projects. But she’s worried about one important part of professional life that might make it hard for her to stay as focused as she would like: email.

Email is something that we’ve increasingly become dependent on—and not just at the university. Email is not only convenient for dashing off quick messages; it’s how we communicate with other members of a department, with administrators in the university, and with our peers across the world on listservs, Google Groups, and more. If email can get in the way of our productivity on a daily basis, imagine how much more disracting it can be while on leave. If you’re trying to be productive on your sabbatical, you might, as my…