Gmail can be even more awe­some with a few exten­sions (for either Chrome or Firefox).

1. ActiveIn­box for Gmail

This is a task man­age­ment plug-​​in which turns emails into action­able items on your to-​​do list. I’ve tried all the to-​​do lists out there (RTM, Too­dledo, Todoist, Pro­ducteev, Todo​.ly, Task­forceapp, Google­tasks, and sev­eral more), and for now I’ve set­tled on this one.  It uses labels to man­age your task lists from within Gmail, and pro­vides a super-​​easy approach to adding dead­lines, project info, etc. to emails that need some action. Then you can archive them away out of your inbox.

You can list tasks com­ing up in chrono­log­i­cal order, or by project, etc. The only dis­ad­van­tage I’ve found is that there is no iPhone app for tasks — you have to be on Gmail in a browser to see what you have to do.

2. Gmail­Tex

I haven’t used this much, but the idea is you can write your email in LaTeX syn­tax and it appears in a win­dow below after being com­piled. Pro­vided the recip­i­ent also has the plug-​​in installed, they can read a com­piled ver­sion within Gmail.

3. Smartr Inbox for Gmail

This is very cool. Down the right-​​hand side, in place of the adver­tise­ments, you will see infor­ma­tion about the senders or recip­i­ents of your email. The infor­ma­tion is extracted from pub­licly avail­able data on social net­works includ­ing face­book, linkedin and twitter.

I get a lot of email from peo­ple I may have met once at a con­fer­ence and have since for­got­ten their name, but using Smartr Inbox means their photo often pops up next to the email remind­ing me who they are. It also tells me infor­ma­tion such as where they work, what job they hold, etc. Click­ing on someone’s name will pro­vide fur­ther infor­ma­tion includ­ing a list all pre­vi­ous email cor­re­spon­dence you have had with the per­son, their recent pub­lic tweets or face­book updates, other peo­ple that have been involved in con­ver­sa­tions with them, etc.

My gmail account has mail going back 15 years involv­ing more than 10000 peo­ple, and this exten­sion has been invalu­able at help­ing me keep track of pre­vi­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tions I have had with peo­ple who email me.

4. Google Mail Checker (Chrome, Fire­fox)

This sim­ply dis­plays, in an icon at the top of your browser win­dow, the num­ber of unread mes­sages in your Gmail inbox. Click­ing the icon opens the inbox.

There are many more exten­sions that I don’t use, but which may be use­ful to other peo­ple. See this list for Chrome, and this list for Fire­fox.

Related Posts:

• In praise of Dropbox
• Back­ing up Gmail
• Take note
• Expand your Drop­box space for free
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references