10 Best Gmail Add-ons and Extensions You Should Have

If you use Gmail (and who doesn’t?), you need to get hold of a few of Gmail’s fantastic add-ons. There’s everything from extensions to ensure you follow-up on responses, to sorting out and auto-archiving emails. Here are the absolutely top 10 of all time Gmail add-ons. How many of these do you have?

1. Boomerang

If someone needs to respond to your email, you cannot keep waiting for it. Use Boomerang to ping the original email back into your Inbox within a certain timeframe to remind you that a response is due. You can also set emails to boomerang back into your inbox if you want to deal with them later. Apart from this, you can also use Boomerang to schedule sending of emails as well.

2. Rapportive

When you use Rapportive, you can see your contacts’ profiles, images and list of emails they’ve sent you in a sidebar. Rapportive can also transform your Gmail account into a Twitter client, enabling you to see your contact’s tweets as well! This add-on goes a long way to help you build better rapport with your contacts.

3. Sanebox

This add-on sorts through your emails, and using a clever algorithm, archives not-so-important emails while allowing important ones to stay in your inbox. Archived emails are tagged with the label @SaneLater, so you can check back and keep them if you need them. Gmail’s Priority Inbox tool also does a similar job, but Sanebox does it all without getting in your way.

4. CloudMagic

CloudMagic is an advanced Search Feature, way more sophisticated than Gmail’s search feature. This add-on sits in your browser, allowing you both online and offline search. You can search your Gmail account within logging in, plus preview messages from your inbox. You can search several Google services simultaneously, including contacts, Google Docs and Calendar.

5. Active Inbox

Using Active Inbox, you can categorize your emails as tasks and group them into projects. You can label your emails as actionable, awaiting response or to deal with someday. Active Inbox helps you decide what to do with an email instead of just storing it. Based on the label, you can assign emails to projects, which helps you keep emails designated for a similar action in one place. Active Inbox allows you to streamline your responses by displaying previous conversations as well.

6. Gmail’s Canned Responses

What this add-on allows you to do is save short standard replies to your Canned Messages list with a label. Any time you want to use that message to send in response to an email, all you do is select it. You have to enable Canned Responses before using it. To do so, navigate to the upper right corner of your Gmail window and click the gear icon. Then select Mail Settings, open the Labs tab, select Canned Responses and then click Enable. Save your changes.

7. WriteThat.Name

WriteThat.Name helps you manage your address book on Gmail and Google Apps. It automatically scans incoming emails and updates your contact database with information sourced from email signatures.  You can opt to allow the add-on to update the information automatically or inform you before updating. This add-on can solve all your address book updating issues, especially if you have huge contact lists or need to keep updating contact database.

8. FollowUp CC

FollowUP CC goes one up on Boomerang when it comes to reminding you when email responses are due. All you do is add a formulated FollowUP CC email address to the CC field when you send the email. This allows you to determine the amount of time you’re willing to wait before sending a follow-up email. For example, if you want to follow-up on an email in 2 weeks, your CC address would be 2w@followup.cc. You can also use this interesting add-on to bookmark site reminders as well, with the time and date.

9. WebMail Notifier

WebMail Notifier is something you should get hold of if you have multiple email accounts. As long as these multiple accounts belong to the same host. Web Notifier checks all your accounts and notifies you of the number of unread emails in each account. You can use this add-on with Gmail, Google Apps, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo. You can obtain additional scripts to use your Webmail Notifier as a Twitter and Facebook tweet and message updater as well.

10. gMail Drive

With GMail Drive, you can access your Gmail account’s virtual drive on your desktop, through your Windows Explorer. All you need is to be hooked to a broadband connection. Your Gmail inbox will be used to store your files, even though you can retrieve, edit and save them through your desktop. You’ll see a new virtual drive in your My Computer folder. You can use this folder just as you would use any folder on your PC i.e you can use Gmail to extend storage capacity of your hard disk.
One that which is out of the above list and not a Gamil add-on itself but worth reading is How to access Facebook through Gmail.