Boosting Gmail productivity
Over the years, AGBeat has written extensively on the move from traditional .com email services to Gmail and addressed the shortcomings of the free email product from Google. The truth is that Gmail has upgraded significantly in recent years and solved many of the problems it has had in past years, plugged holes in the offering, and gone mainstream, shedding the stigma of personal email and is being used internationally for business purposes.
Gmail is no CRM (customer relationship management) tool, however, people try to force it into that role. Enter WriteThat.Name which once installed simply uses your contacts’ email signatures to update your Gmail address book automatically. Rather than searching your Gmail inbox every time you need the most up to date phone number or address, it pulls the information automatically which is also helpful for people that have linked their Gmail address book to their CRM.
The steps to getting started is signing up, granting permission to access your Gmail inbox, and it’s set to begin scanning and adding contact information to your address book, which makes manually entering the data a thing of the past – perfect for busy or lazy people! It will compare the info to the current information and replace it.
The free version updates your contact list weekly and the $3 pro version updates daily and even scans old emails for information. Our initial impression was that it would be helpful if it archived the old information in the event someone erred, but discovered that the company allows you to set it to notify you when it finds new contacts or information so you can opt in or out of updating that information.
Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker1 writes, “Overall, it’s a very cool service, and while I’m not ready to rely on it 100% after my week with it, it could be a pretty useful thing to set and forget in the background and save you some work.”
WriteThat.Name is currently working on a product for Microsoft Outlook users and additionally supports Google Apps (for professional users). The pricing model is also notable in that a significant discount is offered for an annual license, bringing the price down to $1.67 per month.
