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I’m one of the persons that use GMail as my primary email account. All my company emails are forwarded to my Gmail account, this way I can also leverage the best spam filter I’ve ever tried so far. In addition, I have a GMail for your domain account, where my addresses @lucafiligheddu.com point to.

From within Gmail, I can also manage multiple accounts and send emails with this or that mail address, depending on the case. In a nutshell, the best way to keep up on your email and to be as much productive as you can with the application that most of us use continuously and, sometimes, addicted to it.

For the last year I used Gmail on my Apple mail software client (POP3, IMAP was too slow…), since I wanted to have a full integration between emails and other applications. A couple of days ago I switched back to the web version of Gmail, finding out that I can do much, much more with it.

The question is: how to get the most out of GMail? One of the reasons why I gave up on the web version one year ago was because of Safari. Gmail 2 now works well with Safari, but the first version didn’t. In addition, Safari doesn’t let you use some add-ons which definitely improve your productivity and that you can only get on Firefox. But I didn’t use Firefox, Safari was much better to me! So what? What if you are a Safari addicted?

I switched back to GMail 2 and I’m using it on Firefox 3. Why this move (again)? Here is a screenshot of my Firefox 3 installation:

No, I’m not wrong, this is Firefox. I just installed the GrApple theme that you can find here. It completely transforms your Firefox and makes it identical to Safari, much cleaner and far from the heavy and (I say) ugly new interface of Firefox 3.

After this first step, I started tweaking my Gmail installation.

HTML Signatures

First of all, I needed different HTML signatures (not allowed on GMail…) depending on the account I’m sending out my email from. The Firefox extension “Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures” completely solves this problem and you can create multiple HTML signatures for different email addresses. The signature automatically appears on any new outgoing message.

Better GMail 2

Better GMail 2 (version 0.6 is available) is a must-have in order to get multiple improvements all at once. After you install this Firefox Extension, you can choose multiple options to improve your Gmail experience, such as a filter manager, skins, attachment icons and much more. You just have to refresh the page in order to see changes made with Better Gmail.

Notifications

For this, you simply need the software provided by Google, GMail Notifier. This software adds a GMail icon on your menu bar and shows the number of unread messages or shows a small grey box with a preview of the new messages as soon as they arrive.

Alternatively, you can install this Firefox extension, which basically does the same but on the Firefox status bar. In my opinion, it’s not much useful because as soon as you switch to another application, it disappears.. I recommend GMail notifier instead.

Sync

This is one of the best features, since you always have your emails perfectly synchronized between my computer and any other device, like my Nokia N95 or iPhone, something that you can always dream of if you use POP3 on a local mail client. IMAP is a good choice, but it’s crazy slow on Apple Mail and it was really painful using it daily.

What else?

You can check Greasemonkey out together with the multiple scripts available for GMail. Unfortunately, most of them are reported as not working on GMail 2, so just a limited number of them looks reliable. Keep in mind that many FF extensions to improve GMail used to be userscripts used with Greasemonkey.

That’s all for today, I’ll post more tweaks very shortly. Ideas? Other useful tweaks? Please send me an email and I’ll post your recipes for GMail very soon!

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