If you’re using Gmail, you’re halfway to awesome email! Gmail serves as a great hub for all your Google products and is extremely reliable and customizeable, as you about to find out.
Take your Gmail to the next level with these 5 great extensions for Chrome. (I linked extensions for chrome, but you can find these or alternatives for Firefox as well. And if you’re using Internet Explorer, just stop.)
- Rapportive: Rapportive digs through the web to find information associated with the person you are emailing from networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It adds a nice little side panel with information that you can make notes on and easily allows you to add those people to various social networks.
- Mailto for Gmail: This makes it so that email links on web pages automatically open with a compose window from your Gmail account. This allows you to easily respond from your Gmail and eliminates the annoying process of waiting for your desktop client to open.
- Boomerang: Schedule messages to go out at a later time! Looking for an easy way to schedule messages to go out? This is it, you can schedule anytime and they will send when you scheduled them, even if you are offline.
- Offline Mode: About to travel or go somewhere without internet access? Offline more is a tool for Gmail that you can use to sync Gmail with your desktop so that you can work offline. Great if you are traveling and want to work through emails but can’t get online. Everything will be updated automatically when you get back online! This can be enabled from within Gmail by going to settings and clicking on the ‘Offline’ tab.
- WiseStamp: Rich signatures for your Gmail account. Create very nice signatures for your Gmail and share more information on yourself like a picture, links, and social networks. Built in apps make it easy to add a blog feed, recent quote, or whatever else you would like in your signature line.
Bonus: There is a lab feature that allows you to move you chat bar to the right side of Gmail, a really nice thing if you use your chat often. Go to settings and look for ‘Right Side Chat’ under the Labs tab.
Bonus 2: Streak! Streak is an awesome app that gives you built in CRM with Gmail. Great of you have a business and don’t want to use a separate service like Zoho. If it has the features you need, it’s a great extension and works seamlessy with Gmail.