email - page 4

Email has become somewhat of a necessary evil lately, with a attempts like Google’s recent Inbox to use software to corral the over-abundance of the technology into something that makes better sense for us humans.

Designer Brendan Dawes worked with email marketing provider Mailchimp to come up with these fascinating single-use gadgets that bring email into the real world. Nim, the gadget named for a famous chimp in linguistics, is a light switch that lets you turn your email off. And on again, assumedly.

“Email is an interface we’ve been using for years,” Dawes told Wired, “so why not leverage its power some more?”

Dawes has several other gadgets he’s designed in concept. Each one tries to make the digital real and interactive. Some are more successful than others, of course, but they’re all fascinating.

Google’s got a new way to manage email: Inbox. It’s a refinement of Google’s already pretty rad Gmail service, and it’s headed up by the folks, like Jim Denis, who used to work for Sparrow, a fantastic Mac email app that was acquired by Google in 2012.

“Built on everything we learned from Gmail,” says the Inbox announcement, “Inbox is a fresh start that goes beyond email to help you get back to what matters.”

Mailbox has quickly become one of the most popular email management apps on iOS, and now the public is about to get its first taste of what it can do on the desktop too. The company announced this morning that the first public beta of Mailbox for Mac is now available, and they’ve added a couple of new features to go with it.

Apple has added extra protection to iCloud’s outgoing email, making it harder for hackers, the NSA, or any other malicious spying groups to get their digits on your messages.

CloudMagic, the best third-party email client for mobile, just got even better thanks to a major new update that’s available right now on Android and iOS. In addition to adding quick filters for things like unread and starred messages, the release brings customizable alert tones, account nicknames, access to spam folders, and lots more.

They say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. I’d disagree. I think it’s the perfect place. After all, most of my tasks come in via email, and any app that can share information can share it via email. Why bother dickering with an extra app, keeping all that important stuff in two places, when it can all be easily managed in one spot?

I’ve been doing exactly this ever since I ditched OmniFocus, which is so long ago I can’t remember how long ago it was. With a little bit of setup in your everyday news and browsing apps, you can turn your inbox into a proper universal task list. Here’s how.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, email is still the default way to shift files, photos and – yes – mail around the internet. Even when you share a file using Dropbox, the link goes via old-fashioned email. And yet email clients are still awful. They’ve gotten a lot better in the last couple of years, on both iOS and the Mac, but we’re still stuck without a proper task manager that integrates with the native iOS/OS X Calendar and Reminders.

What’s going on?

Despite Apple’s claims that email attachments are safely locked away with data encryption in iOS 7, a new report has found that all your email attachments have been vulnerable and unencrypted for months.

Gusto is yet another iPhone email app that promises to fix your email, and it looks pretty good. It’s Gmail-only and iPhone-only, and its gimmick is that it separates your mail messages into categories according to their attachments. It also has killer search capabilities.

Email is a controlling beast sometimes. Don’t swim upstream against the ridiculous flow of important emails.

With this email course you will learn to effectively manage your email to increase productivity and get hours of your life back. No more wading through a flood of emails. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for 61% off the regular price – just $19!

BlinkMail is a great new OS X mail app that lets you speed through your inbox using just the arrow keys. It also integrates with other services like Evernote, and Dropbox, Things and Omnifocus support is on the way.

Mailtracker is an app that lets you snoop on the folks you send email to. It tells you if and when your mails were read, what device they read it on and what city they are in. Sounds pretty creepy right?

Google released a new update for its Gmail iOS that makes it getting email faster than ever thanks to a new background refresh feature.

The Gmail 3.0 update will now retrieve your mail while the app is not open so you don’t have to keep refreshing to see if your boss finally replied to that important email in the last 5 minutes.

Also included in the update is a new simplified sign-in feature that automatically signs you into all of your Google apps once your login to just one. The free update requires iOS 7.0 or greater and is available now in the App Store.

Here are the release notes:

We’ve all done it, sent that nasty email to a boss, co-worker, spouse. That email that we really wish we hadn’t sent? You know the one.

If only we could go back in time, we could un-send that email and save the hard apology we’ll have to go through.

While Google doesn’t provide a time machine, it does give you a ten second window to rethink your email send. Here’s how to enable it.

Dispatch is one of the greatest email apps for the iPhone (but sadly still not the iPad). It’s purpose is to let you power through your emails and whittle down your inbox in double-quick time. And the latest update adds some welcome streamlining.

Instapaper’s Instapaper Daily feature, which shows the day’s most popular new story for your quick-consuming delectation, was apparently so successful that it has spawned a sequel. Instapaper Weekly. This time it’s not a new website which shows you an ultra-clean view of the day’s top Instapaper story: it’s an email newsletter.

An iOS version has been available since last year, but today sees the official launch of popular email client (and former Kickstarter project) Mail Pilot for Mac.

Google controversially brought Gmail and Google+ closer together this week by introducing a new feature called Email via Google+, which allows anyone with a Google+ account to send messages to your Gmail inbox — even if they don’t have your email address. Unsurprisingly, most Gmail users aren’t so keen on it.

But you’ll be pleased to know there is a quick and easy way to disable Email via Google+ — just follow the steps below.

When you create a new email message in OS X Maverick’s Mail app, you can choose–assuming you have more than one email account in there–which account you’re sending the email from. For example, you might want to send an email from your work account rather than your personal one if it’s work related, and vice versa if it’s about a party you’ve recently attended.

The problem is, when you choose from the drop-down menu in the mail composition window, the account you want to send from may not be in the top spot. It might be a couple of slots down the list. If you want to rearrange the order of these accounts, you can search in the Mail preferences until the cows come home because the ability to do so just isn’t in there.

It is, however, possible to do.

Have you ever responded to an e-mail from your boss with some angry knee-jerk reply, then you’ve accidentally sent it, only to regret it later as you sweep the contents of your desk into a cardboard filing box? Me too, but as Leander never reads any of his e-mail, I — unlike you — still have a job.

Let.ter is a brand new app which will help you stay employed next time. It’s a beautifully simple Markdown-based app with one purpose: composing e-mails away from your main e-mail app.

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a system by which you can create amazing workflow recipes. There’s also an app in the App Store that lets you use the incredibly powerful recipes right on your iPhone. Send all your Instagram photos to Dropbox, for example, or email all your Photos to a specific address. There are tons of recipes you can browse and steal use, plus making your own custom recipes is a snap.

Since emails can often contain things you have to make reminders for follow-up, let’s take a look at turning our emails into reminders using the IFTTT app right on your iPhone.

Movable Ink — a New York City-based company whose technology allows clients to create more relevant email marketing campaigns — has put together this data visualization graphic, showing the United States divided by whether they prefer using smartphones and tablets to access their emails, or the classic desktop approach.

One of the more popular app Kickstarter campaigns in recent memory is the one for Mail Pilot, an app that allows you to tame your inbox by treating it like a to-do list. In April, Mail Pilot was released for iOS, and users were told that a public beta was coming soon. And now it’s here!

Since there are relatively few good alternatives to the iPhone’s stock Mail app, a newcomer to the group usually sparks our curiosity and interest; what’s the cool new spin? Will we actually use it? Will we use it enough that it eventually replaces the Mail app on our home screen?

In the case of attachment-obsessed newcomer Inbox Cube, the answers are fun, yes and possibly.

Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.

In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.