If you follow tech news, it’s been hard to miss mention of Mailbox. Mailbox, as described in some glowing reviews, looks to be a new way to handle email, with a focus on Gmail. The general concept behind Mailbox is to help you get to inbox zero by letting you perform full and half swipes to the left and right to archive, delete, and defer messages. The current problem with Mailbox? There’s a long line to get it. Read more
Tag: Email (page 3 of 7)
Last week I wrote about four steps that have helped me keep my email inbox under control. I mentioned my wife’s interesting inbox, where she has over 7000 unread messages in her main email account. I wonder if that is some sort of record. Whether it is or it isn’t, I’m curious how many unread messages you have in your inbox. Let us know in the comments.
The other night, I glanced over as my wife was using her laptop in bed. I couldn’t help but notice a number that jumped out at me: 7000+ unread items in her email inbox. I think my wife uses her inbox as a holding pen for her messages. She also isn’t too strict about using a second email account as a bacon address for her less important messages. While never as, um, interesting as my wife’s email practices, my inbox was out of control last year. Four changes helped me bring sanity to my email inboxes.
40Tech’s Big Kahuna, Evan Kline, fell in love with Sparrow a while back. It was — and is — the ultimate Gmail client for him, and his post on it left me jealous that it wasn’t available for Windows (yeah, yeah, Apple Fanboys, I see your lips moving, but no sound is coming out). Thankfully, the keen developers on the Sparrow team have seen fit to bring the Ultimate Gmail/Email Experience over to the iPhone.
They do a good job of it, too. The Sparrow for iPhone app is the best email client for iOS to date — with only one potentially deal-breaking problem.
Sparrow (iOS 5 required) utilizes some of the best features of other mobile designs like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and the better features of Mail to bring a fast, super-easy to navigate email client to the iPhone that has the added benefit of being pretty. It has swipe-able overlapping panes, Facebook profile photo integration, pull down to refresh, labels, and a swipe-for-context-menu that gives you the ability to instantly deal with an email without actually having to open it. And that’s just for starters.
Sparrow for iPhone also has a fantastic threaded message UI that allows you to see an entire email chain at a glance, a sweet unified inbox for multiple accounts, send-from aliases (works with your verified Gmail “send email as” emails), and the ability to add images to an email at any given point — you can even take them on the fly, if you like.
Some Screenies from the Sparrow Site
What Sparrow doesn’t have — and this might kill it for power users — is push notifications. This is unfortunate as, for many people, push notifications are an integral part of their mobile life. However, the lack of push comes with good reason: in order to offer it, Apple would require Sparrow to store your email address and password on their own servers. This is a responsibility that Sparrow doesn’t feel prepared to handle — and I say more power to them. Better they remove the feature and recognize their own limitations than to offer push notifications, get hacked, and leave thousands of users’ private email accounts floating in the winds.
Sparrow did attempt to use the same push notification API that Apple offers to VOIP apps (Skype, etc.). This API goes through Apple’s secure servers and would allow the Sparrow app to be “always on” and securely deliver email notifications to you. Unfortunately, Apple rejected the app for utilizing this feature. Sparrow encourages users to contact Apple in the hopes that the policy might be reconsidered in the near future.
Sparrow is also missing POP email account support — it’s IMAP only, for now. Hopefully, that will change in coming updates. Some things that are definitely on the way are landscape mode, localization, a built-in web browser, and “send and archive.” I would also like to see “mark as read” added to the context menu.
Even without POP or push notifications, though, Sparrow is easily the best email client available for the iPhone. It is much easier to use than iOS Mail, and it kicks the crap out of the Gmail app — which I am still happy exists, but would like to see a little lovin’ happening.
Speaking of Gmail, if you are in need of both push and the Gmail “send email as” feature (and don’t utterly loathe the iOS app), the Gmail mobile app has recently been updated to include said feature. You don’t even have to update your iOS app as it is basically a fancy box containing the mobile app’s functionality. Personally, I’m glad to see this feature incorporated, and have no idea why it took so long to do so. As was said above, you can use Sparrow to do this — but Sparrow for iPhone costs $2.99, and Gmail is free. Your call.
What are your thoughts on Sparrow for iPhone? Does the lack of push kill it for you?
People have been talking about the death of email for a while now. Every time there’s a new, communications-focused technology, most notably Google Wave — and we all know how that went — email eulogies pop up all over the internet. It seems likely to me that email is here to stay, at least for a while longer, but if other companies follow the example of Atos, a 74,000 employee French tech company spanning 42 countries, email may actually begin its prophesied decline.
Atos has banned email. At least, they’ve banned it internally. That’s right, those 74,000 employees can no longer send each other minutiae-filled email chains that may or may not ever get fully read. They will no longer be able to forward jokes and silly messages throughout the company or the office. They will no longer be able to send on-line emails to avoid the potential perspiration of actually getting up from their desk and walking over to their friend and asking in person. I say good riddance.
Atos announced the no-email policy in February of 2011, but have now officially implemented it. CEO Thierry Breton, who was also the French finance minister from 2005-2007, said that employee emails are only 10 percent useful, and are 18 percent spam — which seems about right to me, considering the emails I’ve received in companies I’ve worked for. All to often, the emails would be useless time-wasters — especially the ones that involved questions from co-workers that didn’t actually read the email in the first place.
Atos isn’t leaving their employees without a digital option for communication, though. They are using tools such as the Atos Wiki and their Office Communicator chat program to allow employees to collaborate on documents and projects, as well as chat, video conference, and share applications and files.
I think the Atos approach is the only way for a company to successfully achieve adoption of internal social media tools and, so far, the only possible negative fallout I can see would be dependent on the tools they use and how user-friendly they are. They seem to be doing okay in that department, however, as Atos has reported to ABC News that employee response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”
What do you think of the Atos no-email policy? Is it the beginning of a massive “kill email” movement? Will it lead to better outside-company communications as well? Discuss in the comments.
Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy [ABC News on Yahoo.com]