Make the most out of Gmail

Written by Roshi

Gmail has completely revolutionized web mails and my Gmail accounts work as a virtual hard drive on the cloud for storing attachments and contacts. However, it is really hard to manage your contacts and attachments in Gmail especially if you have multiple accounts. I did not want to depend on any of those web apps to manage my contacts and I opted for a simple browser plug-in to get the best out my Gmail accounts.

MailBrowser helps you make the most out of your multiple Gmail accounts by consolidating all contacts and attachments in a browser sidebar. You can have a quick view of your contacts and attachments, plus enjoy hundreds of additional features to make Gmail and Google apps more useful for you. Its feature-rich interface not only helps you to quickly browse the contact list, but also helps to get rid of the need to download a document to modify it.

To get started, download the 3.6 MB Gmail plugin from the MailBrowser website. At present, MailBrowser supports only Mac OS, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. MailBrowser is currently compatible with only Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, but will soon be made compatible with Google Chrome also. Double click the installer file to start the installation. Once installed, it will launch the sidebar tool for your default browser. Alternatively, you can also launch the sidebar by right clicking on your browser and selecting the MailBrowser or by clicking the MailBrowser shortcut on the status bar.

When the sidebar is launched for the first time, you'll have to add your Gmail account by entering the Gmail id and password. Later, you can add multiple Gmail accounts by selecting ‘Add new account’ from the list of accounts. Once the email details are entered, MailBrowser will start indexing the contact list and attachments from Gmail. It will keep all the information in your netbook’s hard drive and is therefore more secure than web apps. You can easily minimize the sidebar by clicking on the cross or status bar shortcut.

The side bar displays the quick list of your contacts and their important details like phone number, multiple email ids, website details and other important information.

MailBrowser has plans to integrate social networking profiles such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in the contact details soon. It also has other attractive features such as display of previous conversations, email conversations stats, tagging of contacts, adding calendar events and notes to particular contacts.

I found the attachment feature quite useful. It offers a rich preview of each attachment, which will be really helpful in searching all the photos and media files without downloading them.

MailBrowser also allows you to edit the documents within the browser and resend them along with the reply to the mail. Edited documents are saved with their modification details and can be simply attached to the reply mails. MailBrowser also allows you to search the content within the attachment as it saves a local copy on your desktop.

Even if you are accessing MailBrowser from multiple systems, your data will be automatically synchronized between the systems. In case your machine crashes, MailBrowser will sync data back to Gmail contacts in the cloud.

It is a slim software, but helps me manage Gmail with ease on my netbook. Now I can easily skip downloading a document for modifying and resending it.

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