Make your Gmail for business workflow sing
Migrating from Mail.app or Outlook to a strictly web-based workflow is a very good idea.
Permalink by:Kasey Kelly Fri Apr 24th, 2009 View Comments
I have a secret. It's one that I should be ashamed of, but here goes: When it comes to e-mail, I'm a stuffy old fool who's crazy skeptical of change. As far as e-mail goes, my workflow hasn't changed much since early college, nearly a decade ago. Sure, I've changed programs… from Outlook to Entourage (when I was a Mac noob) to all of the evolutions of Mail.app – but the workflow has remained largely unchanged. I have always used POP3 or IMAP messages downloaded to my local machine, sorted manually into folders, with an inbox used as a to-do list. When I'm done with a message, I drag it to a folder.
I've been thinking about this for a while. We switched our Servee accounts over to Google apps for business back in February. It's free for up to 50 users, it uses your domain, its IMAP functionality is top-notch, and it's stable. After several hosts failed us, switching to Google was a pretty easy decision.
The first thing I did was set up my IMAP account in mail.app and continued with business as usual. Their IMAP capabilities work just fine. I didn't notice a difference in my workflow. I knew that Gmail was a much better webmail program than any of the off-the-shelf OS webmail apps that I had grown to loathe, but I needed more options for my business account than I thought any webmail app offered.
Today, I'm making the switch. I've been doing some research on Google labels and filters and I'm sold. The days of organizing e-mail by hand and storing mail locally are coming to an end.
Migrate your messages and get label-happy
Documentation is pretty good in this area. You can import your existing e-mail archive (from Outlook or Mail.app) into Gmail pretty easily. It will convert all of your folders to labels. The primary difference between labels and folders is that you can apply multiple labels to a message.
To help prioritize, I created a couple new labels: "Action required" and "Action Urgent." (They're listed in alphabetical order, so those stick to the top.) This way, I don't have to click "mark as unread" until I'm done with the item. When I want to see my to-do list, I click on that label and it sorts everything else out. When the item is done, I simply remove the label.
This is also useful when searching for old messages. The more labels you apply to messages, the easier it is to narrow your search later.
Automate Label application with Filters
With filters, you can tell the program to apply several different actions to several different contexts as messages come in. This goes from basic:
Messages from this address: Apply this Label
to more complicated:
Messages from this address that contain "this word": Apply this Label, skip the inbox (archive), and Mark as Unread.
Note that I'm writing this in english. If you try to enter the above into the filters, they won't work. For help building labels and filters, watch this video.
Clean up your Inbox
The biggest reason for my hesitation to make this switch was the cluttered Gmail inbox in my personal account. I don't need to sort messages from my family and friends, so I've never done any labeling or archiving on that account. I have nearly 3,000 messages in that inbox, but I'd go crazy if my work e-mail looked like that.
This is where the archive function comes in. When a message become irrelevent, you can archive it. You can still get to archived messages by either choosing a filter or the "All Mail" link at the top. All of a sudden, the Gmail instance of my business account looks just as clean and focused as the localized mail that I left behind.
Make it pretty
I'm a designer, so I had to brand it. Gmail allows you to change colors and add your own logo to the business accounts. This is minor, but a little customized eye-candy never hurts:
Make Gmail act like a desktop application
One thing I like about about Mail.app is the pleasant little ding and accompanying badge in the dock icon that notifies me of new messages. To recreate this in the browser, I set up a dedicated Fluid app. This program builds a cocoa app based on webkit for single-site browsing, and was designed with web apps like Gmail in mind. It creates dock icons based on the favicon of the site and displays the red alert badge just like Mail.app does. Problem solved.
Another benefit to using Fluid for Gmail is that each Fluid instance is its own browser. This means that you can be logged into multiple accounts at once, which isn't possible with multiple tabs and windows in Firefox or Safari.
Make it pretty again…
If you're a web geek like me, you would have balked at something I just mentioned. Fluid creates doc icons based on favicons. This isn't especially important, but I'd be a little embarrassed if another designer saw that I had 16px wide pixelated icons cluttering my 50px wide dock. Luckily, I'm not alone. There are a wealth of free icons out there built specifically for Fluid web apps. Thanks to Chris Ivarson for the set that I'm using, shown here.
What about mailto: links?
When using Outlook or Mail.app as your default e-mail client, any time you click on an e-mail address it will open that program. To get this functionality with your Fluid app takes one more (still free) program: Google Notifier. This adds an icon to your menu bar and gives Gmail a little more desktop functionality.
If you miss the chirp of Mail.app's notifications, you can add that as with Google Notifier as well.
A drawback, but not a show stopper
One of the features that I used in Mail.app very frequently as a print designer (but much less now that I'm mostly doing web work) was the "send file" function in Acrobat. I could push a button in an open PDF document that would create a new message and attach the file. Though that should work just like a normal mailto: link, it doesn't.
Overall, I'm very happy with the switch.
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