Tag Archives: email

by Michelle Lentz

Gmail, everyone’s favorite web-based email solution, may finally have some competition. GMX Mail recently debuted their web-based mail application in the US and have had over 100,000 accounts created in the last few weeks.

GMX Mail is a subset of United Internet, which also includes 1&1 and Fasthosts. United Internet’s high speed data centers manage more than 10 million domains. The Group’s data centers set extremely high standards worldwide with 40,000 hosted servers and a monthly transfer volume of 4,000 terrabytes as well as over 5 billion e-mails. GMX maintains more than 10 million active e-mail accounts.

GMX Mail doesn’t just want to provide you with another web-based account. It wants to be your complete email application, replacing the inbox on your local machine. For starters, it gives you that “Outlook” appearance, with traditional folders on the left, with email listings and a preview pane to the right.

GMX offers 5 GB of email storage and seven layers of anti-spam security. You can choose your user id/email address from gmx.com/.us/.fr and many others.  In addition, you can have one default account and then create subaccounts from within your email box. For instance, my default account is michellel@gmx.com, but I can also use michellelentz@gmx.com and writetechnology@gmx.com. They all link to the same default account. You can have up to 10 email aliases.

A cool feature is the mail collector. As part of wanting to replace your desktop application, GMX can manage all of your email accounts, whether Gmail or Hotmail, POP or IMAP. You enter your information and with only 2 clicks, you can send and receive from your other accounts as well as your GMX account. The GMX Inbox includes all of your typical mail functions, including folders, filters, and more. My favorite feature? I love that you can work on several email messages at once, in a tabbed format.

GMX Mail is free, of course, and worth checking out. It’s like you’re getting a new organized Inbox, but it happens to come with a new email address as a bonus.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

A month or so ago, I let you know about Xobni. Spelling “inbox” backwards, Xobni has set out to be a new way to organize and cope with your countless Outlook email messages and contacts.

One of the cool features about Xobni is how fast it performs a people search. However, it has now fleshed out that people search by integrating LinkedIn public profiles. Now if your contacts will display their current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and their LinkedIn contact photo.

Xobni has more plans for this feature:

We have plans to extend this feature with more information from LinkedIn that becomes available when you are logged-in to their service. Make sure to verify that your LinkedIn profile and picture are set to “public” so that other Xobni users can see your pretty LinkedIn picture when you send them an email.

I used Xobni for a bit, because I’m a I was a power Outlook user. I had a bit of trouble with the screen real estate it took away from other things, but I admit Xobni is a pretty powerful tool. Now I’m cruising along in Apple’s Mail.app and I would love a version of Xobni to extend this program.

The new version of Xobni also includes Xobni keyboard shortcuts, folder selection, and several performance improvements. The big news, though, is the integration of the LinkedIn API. The application will update automatically if you already have Xobni. If not, you can download it for free.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

by Michelle Lentz

This week, NPR has been running a series on Morning Edition on The Email Age. Two of the pieces, in particular, caught my fancy.

You see, I lived in Outlook. My whole world is loaded into the contacts, email, tasks and calendar. It’s sad really. This week I switched to a Mac and decided to leave the comforts of Microsoft and use Mail.app. It was a fight, but I won by customizing Mail pretty in-depth.  Why was it so important? Because I get hundreds of emails a day from multiple email accounts. It’s ridiculous at times. And I’m not the only one. According to a Radicati Group white paper, the number of email users world wide is approaching two billion. In 2006, the average corporate email user received 126 email messages per day – up 55% from 2003! The Radicati Group estimates that if email traffic continues this trend, the average user will spend 41% of their time managing email by 2009.  That is, in my opinion, a lot of wasted time.

So how do we cope with this? The NPR series brought up two interesting theories: Email Free Days, and Seriosity Attent.

Email Free Fridays have been implemented in several large organizations (US Cellular was spotlighted in the article). Imagine a day at work that is free from internal email. If you want to discuss an idea, set up a meeting, or get an answer, you need to either pick up the phone or go find your co-worker. I rather like this idea. But it doesn’t eliminate email entirely for the day. For instance, if my husband’s advertising agency implemented this, it wouldn’t help him too much – he’d still be deluged by  emails from his clients. Just because company A has email free Fridays doesn’t mean it applies to companies B-Z. But it’s a nice thought and would serve, I would think, to foster communication internally and at least slightly cut down on email for a day.

Attent is a new email productivity tool by Seriosity.  This is a really interesting tool. Attent turns email into its own economy using Serios (think dollars). Each week you are given a set number of Serios. For this example, we’ll use 300. For each email you send, you must attach at least 1 Serio. If it’s a really important email, you might attach 50 Serios; for a less important email, you might attach 5 Serios. In this way, you are taking the time to consider each email you compose and deciding if it’s worth the email or might be just as easily expressed in a phone call or Face to Face communication. Similarly, the person receiving the email can instantly judge whether it is important and should be acted on right away (50 Serios) or if it is something that can wait until later (5 Serios). Like Email Free Fridays, this only will work internally or with other folks who are using Attent.

Attent hosts all of the Serio Accounting information (your Serio Bank Account) on their servers, and all that is required is a plug-in for the email king of them all – Outlook. It’s an interesting experiment. I like that it forces you to consider – is this really worth an email? Watch a Flash demo of Seriosity Attent.

In order to manage my chaotic email, I’ve installed MailTags, MsgFiler, YAI, and more. It doesn’t control the sheer number of incoming messages, but at least it helps me organize them and stay semi-productive. How do you control and organize your emails? Would your company be perfect for something like Email Free days or Seriosity Attent?

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

By Alex Ho 

At noon PDT today, Yahoo will be releasing its new email domains at “ymail” and “rocketmail”. This will give a chance for people to create more email accounts to diversify your spam into different mailboxes! According to comScore Inc, Yahoo is the email market leader with 266 million users worldwide. I think “ymail” will be a good alternative but I am not sure if people would choose “rocketmail”. You can get your new emails at http://mail.yahoo.com by clicking on the new account link.