Gmail is a great business tool and is complete with custom features that help you organise your email, but did you know that there’s a whole host of Chrome extensions to make the software even better? Enhance and add features with the extensions of your choice, whether you want to receive notifications, make tweaks to the interface for personalised touches or introduce handy visual aids to help you get through your inbox.
In this article the experts at Syntax IT Support London have put together a list of their favourite extensions for Gmail and there’s sure to be at least one you’ll find useful.
Row highlighter for Gmail
This extension might not be particularly ground-breaking, but it does serve a useful purpose and could be helpful to many users. Row highlighter for Gmail simply highlights the heading of an email when you hover over it, providing a visual aid to help you identify which emails you need to open. Skim through senders and subject lines more quickly and customise the colour of the highlight if you so wish, using two shades to identify whether emails have been marked as read or unread.
Dittach
If you receive a lot of emails with files attached, you might find that you sometimes lose track of them and aren’t sure how to find specific documents when you need them. Dittach is a handy tool that tackles this problem by adding a column to the right-hand side of the Gmail main page. The column shows thumbnails of all your email attachments with the most recently received shown at the top. Simply look through this column and view thumbnails to find what you need or use the search function to help you.
When you select a thumbnail, a larger preview of the attachment is opened and you can easily download, share or delete it, as well as open the email to which the file was attached. You can also use Dittach to sort attachments by category, with options including documents, images, music, movies and PDFs.
Mailtrack
If you’d like to track the emails you send and be notified when they are opened by their recipients, Mailtrack is the Chrome extension for you. The free plan lets you send an unlimited number of tracked emails, making it the best option for users who aren’t looking for further features beyond this. The Pro plan does include more features such as click tracking, daily activity reports and reminders, but this is only available at a cost of $5 per month.
Actions for Gmail
Actions for Gmail allows users to add up to four action buttons to the left of each message heading on the main page. The buttons are a time-saving tool designed for more efficient organisation and let you instantly archive, delete, mark as spam or mark as read/unread an email in just one click.
Checker Plus for Gmail
Checker Plus for Gmail notifies you of new emails via useful pop-up windows in the lower-right-hand corner of your computer’s desktop. The pop-ups show the first few lines of the email to give you an idea of their subject as well as their urgency. In Chrome you can also click the Checker Plus icon from your extensions toolbar to reveal a panel listing your unread emails. From here you can read each email, have them read aloud to you, mark as read/unread, reply or delete them without having to go to open Gmail itself.
Another great feature of Checker Plus is that it allows you to monitor multiple accounts, so it’s easy to keep track of personal and business accounts simultaneously without wasting any time.
