The video covers creating labels, filters, shortcuts, managing multiple email accounts and more.

Remember, you can use Boxbe for your Gmail account by signing up here.

[Video via Lifehacker]

Here are some of the latest cool tools I’ve found on the web.

Better Gmail 2
Our friends over at Lifehacker have updated their Better Gmail Firefox plugin to work with the new Gmail interface. We don’t have the new interface yet, so can’t say too much about it. If you do, download the plugin and let us know.

ClearContext, helping with your email overload
New plugin for Outlook "that helps with project management: sorting and categorizing emails relating to a particular subject".

Six Top Ways to Tame Your E-Mail
Web Worker Daily gives us their top 6 email add ons for increasing email productivity.

Batch Add Email Addresses with AddressContext
"The addressContext Thunderbird extension batch processes to and from email addresses for a set of messages from the context menu."

This is a bit of a tougher problem. As I’ve been testing Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, I’ve realized that I get a lot of bacn and adding those senders to my list of approved emailers isn’t fun.

What is bacn?

If you’re like me ten minutes ago, you might be scratching your head. bacn, according to this video from Podcamp Pittsburgh last weekend, is the email that you want to receive, but it’s not immediately valuable. There has been a lot of discussion on the web of this “middle class” of email in the last few days.

People who add you as a friend on Facebook, shipping notices from Amazon, or bill pay notices from Wells Fargo could all be classified as bacn.

A few people in the blogosphere have protested the term, but as good as the real bacon might taste, it sure is something you shouldn’t eat all the time.

What to do with bacn?

What do you consider bacn? Better yet, what do you do with bacn?

Do you set up filters in your email? Do you just let it sit in your inbox? Personally, I use Apple Mail and have a number of filters set up to take these messages out of my inbox and into their own special little place.

Update: there is a great bacn discussion over at Lifehacker.

photo from Flickr user bahkubean

Hack Attack: Back up your Google Apps data – Lifehacker
The power outage that took out a lot of our favorite sites on Tuesday (Craigslist, Netflix, Vox, LiveJournal and others), serves as a little reminder to all of us that putting all of our data in the cloud doesn’t preclude you from backing up those files. While Google wasn’t one of the sites that went down, there are a number of reasons to have backups of your most important work.

How do I create a mail merge in Gmail? – Ask MetaFilter
The Ask Metafilter gang pile on the answers to mailing a lot of people in Gmail.

Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master – Lifehacker
Lifehacker writer Adam Pash has put together a nice hefty post (with video) to take you from n00b to l33t Gmail user. He covers labels, filters, keyboard shortcuts and a lot more.

Top Ten Gmail Tweaks – Trendplex
Steven Price over on Trendplex goes crazy with Greasemonkey and Firefox. The post details out his favorite tweaks to Gmail including macros, colors, Gcal and more.

The “official” 1.0 release dropped today and adds the following new features:

• Nested folders
• Tools menu direct access
• Google Apps compatibility

I’m particularly stoked as a Google Apps user to get functionality spread to my domain as well.

Congrats, Lifehacker, on your 1.0 release.

Read more

I’ve been a fan of Guy’s since he was an evangelist at Apple back in the good (and bad) old days.

He had my dream job – go out and tell everyone about products that change the world. Fortunately, I’ve been able to follow in Guy’s footsteps.

Evangelist, Entreprenuer, Author

Guy has had a amazing career. He created the field of corporate evangelism at Apple back in the 1980’s. He has started his own companies. Most recently, Guy Kawasaki spends his days as a venture capitalist, popular blogger and bestselling author.

Reading Guy’s books are like getting an MBA in product marketing (minus about $50k in tuition). From his marketing and strategy doctrine, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, to his manual on creating a startup company, The Art of the Start, to his new product and marketing creation manifesto, Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy is blessed with gift of being able to break through all the BS and boil down the essentials of what you need to do to make your product fly.

Needless to say, Guy Kawasaki’s books and blog postings are extremely helpful when starting a company or building a new product. Given all the help Guy has given us, we’d like to return the favor.

How Guy Kawasaki Could Use Boxbe

Man… so many uses of Boxbe for Guy, I don’t even know where to begin. I could give Guy some of the same advice I gave Lifehacker blogger, Gina Trapani for her blog, but perhaps a more novel approach would be to use Boxbe to filter pitches for his VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures.

Boxbe’s value proposition centers around the age old concept that time is money. Now, Guy Kawasaki is a busy man and it shouldn’t be free to waste his time with unwanted email and pitches for startup companies that are stupid. I bet a lot of these guys don’t even read his rules for pitching a VC.

5 Easy Steps

Guy – here’s what you can do to weed out the people who don’t follow your rules (or are otherwise irritating).

1. Sign up with Boxbe.
2. Set your access price to $99 (our current maximum).
3. Post your new email address on your blog.
4. Wait for pitches (this shouldn’t take long).
5. If the pitches waste your time, collect $99.

You could take one of your other, smarter investments to dinner with the money. Alternatively, you could give the money to charity – or keep it. You pick.

What about everybody else?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a VC or famous blogger to use Boxbe. Anyone who has a problem with spam or unwanted email can use Boxbe and just act like you are.

photo by Dave Sifry on Flickr

Who is Gina Trapani?

Well, the blog doesn’t just write and edit itself, folks. And we think that Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding Editor and efficiency wünderkind, is the bee’s knees. Being Editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, Gina doesn’t just sit around waiting for her blogger minions to write up posts so she can nitpick vocabulary and spelling, Gina normally writes about 6 posts a day and two weekly features. Many of those posts are tips emailed in from readers.

Besides being a brave soul who actually has an email address on her personal blog, Lifehacker has a public email address on every single page to their tips hotline.

I can only imagine how much spam and unwanted email she must receive. Given all the help Gina has given us, we’d like the opportunity to return the favor.

How to use Boxbe

One way Gina could use Boxbe would be to make all of the people submitting their tips to Lifehacker prove that they are human with our simple captcha test. Better yet, to prevent marketers from over running her inbox with pitches, she could simply set her contact price to $.10. That way, she could quickly weed out everyone who wasn’t serious about getting her attention by collecting a dime from every submitter who was marketing to her. She’s not going to get rich off of this, but it does raise the bar to reach Gina.

Her posts show that Gina Trapani is a power user of Google’s Gmail. Arguably, she might know Gmail better than anyone. She’s even created a plugin to make it better. We’ve added our own improvements to Gmail by integrating Boxbe into the service. The process is free and easy and can dramatically improve the quality of email that you receive in Gmail.

Boxbe does this by reducing your inbox to only the email that you want to read and leaving the rest in our quarantine. In practice, we accomplish this by allowing emails from people who are pre-approved in your white list, that take a test to prove they are human or pay a fee.

But Gmail has a spam filter…

Despite Gmail’s wonderful spam filter, unwanted emails and spam do slip through. We’re firm believers that filter based solutions to stop spam simply won’t work in the long run. Ultimately, the war on spam is an arms race and the good guys are losing. Market based solutions like ours are really the only long term solution getting rid of unwanted email and spam.

While you might not be a famous blogger, I bet you do have a problem with spam. Just like Gina and the crew at Lifehacker, we’re here to help.

photo from Flickr user rcrowley

Have a happy and safe Memorial Day from all of us here at Boxbe.

10 ways to get a grip on your e-mail – Fortune Magazine
Authors of the new book The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut and Reclaim Your Life!, offer up ways to get through email and change the way you look at time spent looking at email.

Is a one word “thanks” email unnecessary? – Lifehacker
Lifehacker readers debate the finer points of whether or not to send a one word email response “thanks” to people who you would thank face to face in real life. Email etiquette is ever changing amorphous beast. Personally, as a someone who works remotely, this is the only way I have to thank most people, so I’m all for it, your mileage may vary.

How to crank through your Gmail – Web Worker Daily
Leo Babauta over at Web Worker Daily gives us some hands on tips and tricks for getting through your email account Gmail-style. Keyboard shortcuts, filter suggestions and more await you on the other side of this link.

Finally, a follow up to a link we gave you last month.

E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’ – Washington Post
Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post reports on Fred Wilson’s email bankruptcy post last month. Fred gave his inbox the heave-ho by blogging an apology to all the unanswered emails in his inbox to start fresh. Memorial Day might just be the time to send out that email to start over with your email.

Iwo Jima image from Flickr user bootbearwdc

Shortcuts for Special Gmail Labels
Over at the Google Operating System blog, Ionut Alex Chitu details how to use Gmail’s labeling system’s undocumented shortcuts. “In Gmail every built-in view (e.g.: inbox, trash, read mail) is actually a label. So if you want to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you could search for: label:inbox label:unread.” [via Lifehacker]

Rich HTML email signatures straight from Gmail
Derek Punsalan shows how to get rich text into Gmail signatures. While it does require Firefox and the Better Gmail extension, we know you’re already using those anyway.

Add Outlook to your Google homepage
Our friends at Lifehacker show off how to get your Outlook mail to show up on your iGoogle personalized home page. This gadget does require you to use Windows XP and IE (or a slightly hacked version of Firefox). Very cool indeed.

I mentioned last week that Thunderbird 2.0 RC1 was released. Yesterday, the Mozilla foundation released Thunderbird 2.0.

From Wired.com:

Thunderbird 2.0 is a major leap forward for the Mozilla email client and boasts much improved performance as well as some great new features like support for message tagging, a customizable folder pane and one click integration with popular webmail services like GMail and .Mac.

Fire up your browser and go download it!

Release info [via Lifehacker]

Features include “adding saved searches, attachment icons, label colors, keyboard macros, a filter assistant and right-click conversation previews.”

Massive spam shot of ‘Storm Trojan’ reaches record proportions
According to a recent article in Computerworld, the Storm Trojan virus attack is sending 50 to 60 times the normal volume of spam. The trojan contains a rootkit to cloak itself and it adds the computer to it’s botnet army to perpetuate the trojan horse. Scary stuff. [via PC Doctor and Slashdot]

Gmail vs. Yahoo! Mail Prize Fight [video]
CNET decides which email service is better. We won’t disagree with the results.

Speed up Mail.app (Mac OS X)
Hawk Wings describes a quick trick to slim down Mail.app’s SQLite database and getting a snappier email client as a result.

Send Gmail to your cell phone
Ben Murphy describes a great way to send email selectively to any cell phone (hopefully, your own). Not quite a Blackberry, but great for getting important messages on the go. [via Lifehacker]

Turn Gmail into your personal nerve center
Does anyone just use it for email anymore? Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion documents 5 ways to make Gmail the center of your productivity universe including:

1. How to turn Gmail into a massive personal database
2. How to get real-time news updates in Gmail (Gmail+ Google Talk + Twitter)
3. How to automatically store your bookmarks in Gmail (Gmail + del.icio.us + Yahoo Alerts)
4. How to manage Calendar and To-Dos in Gmail (Gmail + Backpack + GCal + GTalk + iMified)
5. How to blog from Gmail (Gmail + Wordpress/TypePad/Blogger + IMified)

Hope you had a great weekend. Now, get back to work! :-)

• Backing up Gmail with Thunderbird
  
• How to set up a smart Out-of-Office auto-reply with Gmail
• 8 killer Thunderbird plug-ins
• Outlook Tip: Send an email without touching the mouse
• Mailredirect – Thunderbird plugin

With its 2.8 gigabytes of space, full keyboard interface, and POP access, we’re big fans of Google’s free Gmail service. Google opening up the service to the world is a monumental occasion for the Mountain View company.

Googlers were none to shy to let us know how they feel about the launch. “We have already made e-mail better for everyone in the world,” Google’s Coleman boasted.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Gmail

Read
[via Lifehacker]