8 Free Tools To Significantly Up Your Email Game

Save time and communicate more effectively

We can’t quite seem to get away from email. It has been around since the early 1970’s and has stubbornly survived one technological revolution after another.

While email remains a valuable and integral part of modern society, it’s becoming increasingly unfit to handle the sheer amount of communication we all receive in our inboxes every day.

Chat services like Slack have drastically reduced the overall amount of intra-company emails (it’s one of the first things I implement at each of my companies), but they fall short of addressing the larger issue of general online communication.

So while email is a necessary evil, that doesn’t mean we have to live with plain old Gmail.

Here are 8 free tools I’ve used to significantly up my email game.

Spark

Spark is a smart email client that solves the problem of an overwhelmed inbox.

Spark Email App for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch

Spark was created by Readdle, a company that produces some of the best-made iOS and Mac apps. I’m currently using Spark as my default client for work email. It’s been the most reliable, quick, and bug-free email client I have used so far.

Some standout features include:

• Smart Inbox — Automatically categorize emails and surface the most important ones. I was hesitant initially that it would miss some emails, but have been mightily impressed by how well this feature performs. If anything, it places a few too many emails in this area, but better safe than sorry.
• Smart notifications — Only notifies you when you get an important email. This is huge for me since I get dozens of work emails every day. It’s similar to Google’s Inbox in this regard.
• Quick replies — Similar to “liking” a comment on Facebook you can quickly click a “reaction” to an email that sends a response to the sender with an emoji and quick response. I have found myself using this rather often for those emails I’d usually reply to with “yes” or “sounds good” or “thanks.” Plus you can create your own custom quick responses!

Some drawbacks include: No Android app, no email templates, and no send later feature.

Polymail

A simple, beautiful, and powerful email client for Mac.

Polymail for Mac and iOS

Another email client I used for a few months last year. I love the design of Polymail, and I was very impressed with their overall choice of features. The only reason I stopped using Polymail was because they started to charge $10 monthly for the features I loved (message templates, send later, and link-click tracking). However, the base version of Polymail is still free and worth a shot if you want these features among others:

• Email open tracking — Superbly useful when doing followup for sales and other conversations.
• Contact profiles — This was the main reason I used Polymail. It pulls in social media profiles and conversation history, giving you context for every communication.

Astro

Modern email apps for Mac and iOS, powered by artificial intelligence, built for people and teams.

Astro for Mac

Here’s an interesting idea — include an AI personality within your email inbox to hopefully provide better assistance. I used Astro for about a week when it launched. My favorite feature by far was asking the assistant to help me clean up my email subscriptions. It was super quick and totally painless. You can also use Astrobot to set reminders and to help you remember to answer questions it’s detected in your inbox. I only stopped using it because I found the features with Spark were too useful to give up. The service is free (for now) and is perhaps a sneak peak into what email will eventually become.

TinyMails

Aims at encouraging brevity in correspondence, by showing the character count of the currently typed email in Gmail.

TinyMails Chrome Extension

TinyMails is a Chrome extension that places a word count at the bottom of your compose window. It uses a simple calculation to tell you how long it would take to read your email. The whole idea is to make the world a better place by reducing the length of emails people have to read.

Templates for Gmail

Create and customize templates that live in your inbox.

Templates for Gmail gif

If you prefer to email in the browser check out Templates for Gmail. It’s a free Chrome extension that’ll add a template feature to your email. Creating them is simple, and adding them to an email is even easier. Gmail’s Labs does have a canned responses feature you can enable, but I’ve found it to be buggy and it randomly deleted all of my saved templates a couple of months ago. 😢

Art of Emails

50+ proven sales email templates.

Art of Emails templates

Here are some email templates to drop into your Templates for Gmail plugin. These templates go beyond just providing you with content. They walk you through step-by-step and show you why the particular email is effective. Last week I used the “Ask Customer for Review” template to great success!

Loom

Faster than typing. Save time everyday with quick videos for free.

Loom screen recording

Loom provides taste of the future of post-email communication. And it does so by simplifying a process down to the point where literally anyone can use it. Loom lets you record videos of your screen while you walk people through things. It’s show vs. tell. And whenever you’re communicating with a customer (or teaching your mom how to upload pictures to her computer), show is going to be so much better. We recently launched a dashboard for our Lifeline product at Dentma, and I’ve used Loom to walk multiple doctors through the new interface. I love it because it was literally quicker for me to record and send the video than it would have been to type out instructions and answers to their questions. And the best part is the customers loved it too!

HTML Templates

Modern email templates designed by the best email designers in the business.

HTML Templates product announcement

This is for any of you using services like Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Hubspot, etc. where you can upload HTML to the email builder (I’d recommend you have some basic knowledge of HTML before diving into this). These templates will save you TONS of time, and they’re pre-built to display consistently across all email clients. Litmus (litmus.com) is the site that’s providing the templates, and they’re the leading experts in testing email across all clients. So you can rest assured that you’re getting the best of the best here.

So while the soul of email does live on, that doesn’t mean you have to suffer through its many inefficiencies. These tools will immediately make a difference in how you tackle your unwieldy inbox and organize it going forward.

Thanks for reading. Have any great tools you’ve used to add to this list? Tap the heart and drop a comment below! ❤️👇