Chrome Extensions to Help You Streamline your Gmail Workflow
Google’s business product, G-suite, is an ideal platform for just about any business that wants to manage their day to day operations on a user-friendly interface, and 6-million people agree. It’s easy to navigate and far less of a hassle than setting up other mail providers like Outlook. However, as with any platform, there are a few areas where Gmail can fall a little short.
That’s why there’s the chrome extension. Although it’s best to keep your number of Chrome extensions limited (it’s a privacy minefield), the following are great options for anyone who wants to avoid the caveats of Gmail and get through their workload effectively and efficiently. Let’s take a look.
Anyone who’s ever found themselves in a mile-long thread in Gmail will probably understand how much of a mess it is to find an attachment someone sent—especially if it’s not the most recent message.
This extension integrates a button into the email thread, and in just one click, users can bring all the attachments in the email to the top of the page. They can then be downloaded as usual.
One of the more irritating features of Gmail is the fact that the conversation is always at the bottom of the page, which sometimes means endless and frankly needless scrolling to get to the end of the thread.
With the Reverse Conversation extension, users can flip everything around so it reads like it would in other mail apps, like Outlook, for example. The plugin uses CSS to achieve this, meaning there are no unnecessary scripts running in the background.
Overall, this extension makes anybody’s daily emails a lot less time consuming and adds to the user experience 10-fold. Honestly, it’d be nice for Gmail to include this feature as standard in future updates.
Although the Gmail mobile app shows users the time a specific email was received, it only does this if it’s been sent the same day. Otherwise, it’s just the date that appears.
On desktop, the time isn’t shown at all, which is pretty annoying for some users, especially for business owners who aim to respond to all client emails within an allotted amount of time.
This handy extension displays both the full date and time of when the last email in the thread was sent in an easy to read 24-hour format, meaning response times can be adhered to.
One of the frustrating things about Gmail is the fact that the subject line isn’t displayed when replying to a thread. For anyone who has a tendency to forget what an email’s about halfway through writing it, then the ShowSubjectGmail extension is the perfect solution.
With this extension, users will be able to see a subject line appear under the reply. This small, yet impactful extension is perfect for any inbox, plus it’s really small - just 2kb, meaning it won’t slow down the interface one bit.
These extensions are a sure fire path to an overall improved UX when working with Gmail. They’ve helped countless users time and time again and all have solid feedback.
With any luck, the team at Google will pay attention to which kinds of extensions people are creating to overcome the challenges they face with Gmail and eventually build these features into the platform. Until then, the extensions above are a great addition for busy Chrome users.