How I use Gmail

Published in category Productivity
on Christian Mayer's Weblog.

Since I have no longer a root server I moved my emails to Gmail. I love Gmail because it’s working in the browser, too. Like in the good old days on mail.com. But with more style.

Another benefit is that you don’t need to setup Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail App or any other MUA software - again and again and again[1] from scratch on each new PC. You don’t need to mange your server, keep looking for the newest security patches for your server software or keep the server software up running.

Gmail looks pretty well with Compact display density and Gmelius Chrome Extension. So why not[2]?

Using keyboard shortcuts makes Gmail very fast. Don’t need to click. Press Shift+? to get an overview of all keyboard shortcuts on Gmail.

Inbox

Another recent tool made by Google is Inbox.

It reformates your filter settings. Inbox rolls up your painful hand-crafted filters and you can’t undo it automatically. You may think that if you change something in Inbox that it doesn’t effect Gmail. But you’re wrong. All it does is to serve your emails in another way and change in the background your Gmail settings. Inbox is made for people who are bad at managing emails. If you already have no system to mange your emails Inbox could be a solution for you. And also if you already don’t use Folders (Labels), Stars, etc. of Gmail.

But the fact is: you don’t need all these Zero Inbox-tools to manage your emails. It’s not that hard. If you have a working solution it’s possible with plain Gmail or any other mail software.

Inbox has no Compact view. Everything is big. This isn’t my style. I like the compact view of Gmail very much. And on all other Google products my favourite is always the compact view. Simple things are the best.

This is what Google Inbox looks like:

Google Inbox

It only works in Google Chrome yet.

Footnotes

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About the Author

Christian is a professional software developer living in Vienna, Austria. He loves coffee and is strongly addicted to music. In his spare time he writes open source software. He is known for developing automatic data processing systems for Debian Linux.