Freeware Files: 5 Add-ons for Ultimate Email Tweaking!

Posted 01/25/2010 at 1:45pm | by David Murphy

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It's difficult to envision a life without email. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. Suffice, digital messaging is just a fact of geek life that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Whether your inbox gets flooded with messages like the Nile during rainy season, or it's barren as one of those outback wastelands that Bear Grylls likes to visit, you probably aren't using your email client of choice to its fullest potential.

That's ok. Neither was I before undertaking the research for this week's open-source and freeware roundup. But now that I have seen the light, as it were, I would never go back to the ol' vanilla installations of Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, or whatever one's particular email utility of choice happens to be. There are just too many interesting ways to tweak and alter the normal email experience to better enhance your ability to read, organize, and shuffle your messages.

That's kind of "the big point" of the roundup this week--making your email work better for you. Click the jump, and I'll show you five apps and utilities for taking your email processing to the next level!

KLS Email Backup

If you're the kind of person who likes to run full system backups, then congratulations--you may skip over this helpful piece of freeware because you're as protected as you're going to get on your PC. That said, you might want to keep reading anyway. If your email is a lot more critical to your daily life than what your weekly (or whatever) backups provide, then you'll want to check out KLS Email Backup and its wide array of potential uses. This simple app makes it easy to backup and restore a huge range of programs to local or network drives, including both full and incremental backups as well as zip-based compression. I'd list the all the supported clients here, but it might take up another full paragraph...

Download it here! 

MailDrop

You've seen plenty of examples of how to use the popular file-synchronizing client Dropbox to, well, keep a consistent folder full of files across however many desktops or laptops you use. Here's another trick: MailDrop is a little utility that, once run, will open up your common Dropbox folder to the wonderful world of email. The program runs in the background of your system and checks an email account you specify on a fairly regular basis. When it finds new messages and attachments in this account, it'll automatically download the files and slap them into your Dropbox folder, which will then synchronize said files across whatever computers you've elected to put into your Dropbox Web.

And no, you don't need to make a new email account to use this functionality--MailDrop will only look for files and messages in a specific "Dropbox" folder in your messaging system (or Dropbox label, if you're on Gmail).

Download it here! 

OutSync

Outlook-only on this one, folks. And what a bummer that is, because OutSync is a pretty useful tool for automatically populating your Windows contacts with photographs of your friends. The only catch is that you have to have a working Facebook account for this to happen. Why's that? OutSync mashes up your Windows contacts with their respective profile photographs on their Facebook accounts. It might sound lame at first glance, especially to those of you who aren't into the whole Web 2.0 community thing. But the alternative--manually finding a picture for every single contact you know--sounds a bit mind-numbing to me.

Download it here! 

Zindus

Fair's fair, Thunderbird users. Here's an add-on that's for you and you alone. Zindus is a simple little utility that allows you to synchronize your Google Contacts with Thunderbird's Personal Address Book (or an address book that's been named after your particular Gmail address). The synchronization is two-way, so feel free to add and update new information on either the Thunderbird or Gmail side. If you're an intrepid user, you might notice that certain fields don't exactly correlate between the desktop client and your Web client. Zindus tracks following fields during your synchronization attempts:

• Full Name
• Primary Email address and Second Email address
• Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Work Fax, Pager, Mobile
• Instant Messaging (AIM)
• Company and Title
• Notes 

Download it here!

Googsystray

All this talk of desktop clients makes me feel like I've overlooked a biggie. I apologize for not finding an application or utility that's more applicable for a whole host of Web-based email services than what's offered by Googsystray. However, I think it's safe to say that most--if not all--of us have Google accounts for some kind of service. I mention that fact, because Googsystray is an excellent tool for keeping abreast of what's going on in all of the Google services worth knowing about. As the name implies, this app pops up a little message box in the corner of your desktop whenever something new happens in one of the following services:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Calendar
• Reader
• Wave 

It's as simple as that! You can have the app notify you with a little sound if you prefer, and even run a specific command whenever a particular action takes place (like a new item popping up in your RSS feed, for example).

Download it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you're dying to recommend!