7 Gmail plugins to boost your productivity

            Today I’ll be giving a short overview of my seven favorite Gmail plugins. I’ll be featuring an array of very useful tools to help you up your productivity by automating certain tasks, streamlining your user experience through simplifying your inbox, and gaining better control of several aspects of Gmail using utilitarian inbox plugins.

1. Unroll.me: (Outlook, Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and iCloud) Unroll.me shines in its simplicity and ease of use. Once installed it automatically populates a list of all your subscriptions. For every entry you have three options; keep in inbox, unsubscribe or add to Rollup. The first two options keep in inbox and unsubscribe are pretty straightforward. Rollup is a feature where any subscriptions you add to rollup are then hidden from your inbox. Then presented to you in a news feed/social media feeling format daily.

2. Gmail snooze: (Chrome only) Snooze is a great little plugin that allows you to “snooze” emails so they disappear for a set amount of time and then remind you when the snooze period has ended. It’s a simple idea but also a powerful tool in your productivity kit. Snoozing less urgent mail will allow you to focus on what’s important without forgetting to respond to less urgent matters.

3. Rapportive: (Chrome, Firefox, Google Apps) Rapportive dredges the internet for information on your Gmail contacts. Once installed simply open an email from any contact and all sorts of information about them will instantly load on the side bar. This will show you different social media accounts they are connected to, as well as pictures and a small bio. When it comes to building your career, and trying to make connections Rapportive is a great addition to your networking arsenal.

4. Boomerang for Gmail: (Chrome, Firefox, Sarfi, Edge, Opera) Boomerang for Gmail is a bundle of a few really nice messaging tools. Boomerang allows you to schedule your emails to send at a specific time. Boomerang also allows you to resend an email in a predetermined amount of time if you get no response. What really sets Boomerang apart however is its AI assistant called respondable. Respondable looks at your email as your composing it and offers advice on how to make it more professional and more likely got get a response.

5. Bananatag: (Gmail, Outlook, iOS, Android) Bananatag allows you to track your sent emails. You will be sent a notification when someone opens your email, beyond that you will get a plethora of information. If any links were clicked, attachments opened, how long they viewed your message etc.

6. Gmelius: (Chrome, Opera, Sarfi) Gmelius offers many features that have already made this list. Including schedule emails, snooze messages and track email opens. Beyond all of these the most impressive feature of Gmelius is it allows to block other email tracking plugins. For example, if someone sends me an email and they use Bananatag to track it Gmelius will then block the tracking. Then notify me that they were using Bananatag to try to track the email and that the tracking was successfully blocked.

7. Key Rocket: (Chrome) Key Rocket is a must have for anyone who uses keyboard shortcuts. How it works is anytime you perform an action that you could have used a keyboard shortcut for Key rocket prompts you with what sequence of keystrokes would have accomplished your task. This is great because its constantly teaching you shortcuts, after having this installed for a week I navigate through Gmail much faster.