The media was quick to dub it ‘Emailgate’ but when former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton combined her personal and business emails onto one device, she unwittingly kicked up a fresh news storm on email transparency.
Citing her reason as not wanting to carry around two smartphones, something that every small business owner can relate to, she was ordered to release her private email server after it emerged that she used it while serving in official roles between 2009 and 2013.
It was not illegal at the time to merge the two but as Cryoserver’s Robin Bingeman says: “It seems incredible that one of the world’s most powerful politicians sent all correspondence from a personal email.”
Here are five tools that small businesses, and Ms Rodham Clinton, can use to help better handle emails and stay one step ahead of getting overloaded.
1. Mailbox
When Mailbox was released on iOS in 2013, later bought by Dropbox, it famously had a waiting list of some 800,000 people. One of its key features was its email snooze function that instantly grabbed people’s attention. Now released on Android, it is a great tool for anyone needing to increase email productivity. It’s one of those apps that you’ll come to rely on very quickly and will wonder how you ever lived without it. Rather than having to mark an important email as ‘Unread’ after you’ve opened it, you can discard it and then have it re-enter your inbox when you know you’ll have the time to respond properly. Effortlessly simple but extremely useful when you are rushing off or don’t want new tasks upsetting your flow.
2. Contactually
Contactually is a virtual assistant for your email that takes an active role in your inbox. It’s part customer relationship management, part email manager. It connects all of your email and social accounts and puts all of your contacts into ‘buckets’. You can decide how often to keep in contact with them and to prioritise their emails accordingly. If you need to give a new client extra attention, it can tell you which customers you have not spoken to in a while and prompts you to engage with them. Its Morning Digest feature sends you an email first thing that summarises the actions or notifications from your calendar and cleverly prompts you with suggestions that it infers from your email history.
3. Triage
Triage is an amazingly simple app that does exactly what you would expect. It isn’t a bells and whistles email client but rather offers emergency email help that is effective for clearing correspondence backlogs. It’s especially effective when you come back from holiday and literally have thousands of emails to go through. It works by presenting your emails to you in a card deck format, allowing you to rapidly flip through the pile and swiping to delete, archive or to keep as you need.
4. Boxer
Boxer has been around for a while now but is still a hugely popular email tool, angled at speeding up your productivity by getting everything under control in one place. Its feature- rich interface is like a portal to all your contacts’ lives at once and for many people it really is the final word in email management, merging work and personal accounts and working across platforms.
5. EasilyDo
EasilyDo is a personal assistant app that is fast becoming extremely popular for its versatility and powerful features to help you simply get more things done. You can connect your work and personal email accounts and it now has a Salesforce integration that is aimed at luring in fresh business interest. EasilyDo allows you to schedule texts and important notifications or social media posts well ahead of time, while prompting you when key events are approaching. It has tonnes of useful things that shave a few minutes here and there off your day, quickly adding up to being much more productive.
While no one has really been able to effectively solve the email problem yet, the latest range of apps in 2015 look set to take things one confident step closer to helping small businesses keep their inboxes under control.
