A good review and a “quick look” video of the EmailTray email client were recently posted on FindMySoft.com on March 28, 2013. EmailTray was reviewed by George Norman, a news editor and software reviewer at FindMySoft. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft rated EmailTray 5 out of 5 stars, naming it Essential.

The review outlined the most prominent features of the EmailTray email client:
“Wonderful functionality is provided for free by EmailTray: be notified about new messages, read the messages you received, efficiently sort all your email messages, send out emails, mark messages as important, rescue messages from the spam folder, and more. Access to all this functionality is done via a user friendly, quite good looking interface. So to recap, we have a properly good email client with a nice interface and with no price tag. Again, if you’re looking for an email client, you’re well advised to get this one.”

Here are a few words about the EmailTray software’s functionality:
“From a functionality point of view, EmailTray has a lot to offer. Here’s a quick look at its main features and functions: monitor multiple accounts, notifications for new emails, configure the EmailTray notifications, check for new messages every X minutes, set up custom email rules, back up your mail database, restore mail database from backup, create custom signatures, group emails based on their priority, rescue messages marked as spam, send email messages.”

You can read the full FindMySoft Editor’s Review of the EmailTray email client at emailtray.findmysoft.com. Make sure to share it with your friends on Google and Facebook, and download EmailTray if you haven’t yet done so!

A Desktop Email Client: Pros and Cons

Everyone knows there’s been a never-ending dilemma about whether to choose “a desktop email client vs. web-based email,” so let’s explore the pros and cons of desktop email programs to see why people stick with them for years.

Pros:

• You can track multiple email accounts all in one place, without signing in and signing out of accounts
• A desktop email client is not dependant on Internet connectivity and bandwidth
• With a desktop email client, you can access pre-downloaded emails offline
• If you track multiple email accounts, replying to a message puts the proper From: email address on it automatically
• You can back up your mail database as often as you wish and store it in place you wish, e.g. your hard drive
• You don’t have to pay for cloud storage to back up and store large email database files
• With a good desktop email client, you’ll have a broader scope of features and settings than with Webmail
• You will be focused on emails rather than on websites under browser tabs

Cons:

• You are tied to an OS such as Windows, Linux or Mac
• It might take some time to install and configure a desktop email client
• Syncing between multiple computers and devices can be problematic
• You might not want to keep your mail data on the computer you are using
• For those who prefer simplicity, it can be a pain to learn how to use one more software program
• It might not be worth installing a desktop email client in order to track one email account

As you see, there are both pros and cons of using a desktop email client. According to the About.com’s Readers Choice Awards 2012, the best Windows email clients suggested by the readers are Mozilla Thunderbird, MS Outlook, EmailTray, IncrediMail and The Bat! All these email programs offer a rich set of features and configurable settings which has accounted for thousands of users being devoted to these software products for years.

It surely takes much more time to install a desktop email client, fine-tune email rules and customize your email program’s look and feel according to your taste. The presence of customizable options in complicated email programs keeps heavy email users away from simpler yet less effective online solutions. If you prefer simplicity – you’ll probably have to sacrifice advanced functionality.

Cloud-Based Email: Pros and Cons

The most popular web-based email services are Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and AOL. If you don’t need to manage multiple email accounts, Gmail is probably the best cloud-based email option for you. It provides 10GB of free hosted space for your emails, including attachments, and offers a number of configurable options.

The obvious drawbacks of free Webmail solutions are annoying ads occupying some part of the screen space and no guarantee that your mail database will always survive. For the large corporations that plan on moving to secure cloud-based email solutions, Hosted Microsoft Exchange might be a good way to go.

Pros:

• No installation is required because cloud applications are rendered in the browser
• With a web-based email client, you are not tied to any platform such as Windows, Linux or Mac
• You can use a cloud-based email service across devices without worrying about conflicts and synchronization
• Cloud applications are easier to update or are updated automatically by a provider
• You can log in to your web-based email account from anywhere
• You can keep all your email data off your computer

Cons:

• Cloud-based email services rely upon the internet infrastructure for data transport and content rendering
• Free Webmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read
• You can only be signed in under one Gmail account at a time in one browser, so using an online service attached to another Google account is impossible
• A cloud version of a popular software product will often provide fewer features than the desktop version
• There is no guarantee that your free web-based account will always be accessible
• It’s not very convenient to click through new browser tabs and switch back and forth
• When you use a browser, you may feel tempted to browse the websites under the other tabs

For those who run one email account and don’t use it heavily, there is obviously no need to install a desktop email client; Webmail will cover their needs in most cases.

If you do have to manage multiple email accounts but prefer web-based email, you have two solutions available. First, you can create one primary Gmail account and have emails from the other email accounts forwarded to it. Another way is to open multiple browsers, each one dedicated to a specific email account. However this practice may end up in overloading your CPU.

Which Way Is Best For Me?

There is a wide-spread opinion stating that web-based email is great for personal email communications while a desktop email client is perfect for work, especially if you have to manage multiple email accounts. I’s true that professionals often tend to choose more complicated yet feature-rich solutions which offer a variety of options and an ability to track multiple email accounts and manage email contacts with ease.

If you run one email account and don’t need all those bells and whistles – choose Gmail, a popular Webmail service which offers many features similar to those in a good desktop email client, plus lots of cloud storage for free.

If you heavily depend on email in your daily work and run multiple email accounts – a good desktop email client like Mozilla Thunderbird, MS Outlook or EmailTray will cover your needs. Even if you use email occasionally – you may still want to try the EmailTray email client, as it is lightweight and easier-to-use when compared to the other desktop email programs. Plus EmailTray has a smart algorithm that sorts mail into 4 priority folders and synchronizes what it learns across devices. The good news is that EmailTray is free to use and is coupled with a free email app for Android. That means you will enjoy a similar interface across all your Windows-based and Android-based devices.

It’s easy to give advice on how to make your signatures effective and beautiful (and below you will find our tips). But anyone who has tried to use automatic signatures in Outlook or Gmail knows it’s rather hard to implement. Keeping this in mind, the EmailTray development division has created a smart email client for Windows and Android that is great in email sorting and notifying, protects you from spam and phishing, and also lets you use automated signatures easily. Use the EmailTray email client for Windows to create and use different signatures for your replies and forwarded emails as well as for newly composed emails. EmailTray will add them automatically.

1. The first advice is to use different signatures for newly composed letters and for replies and forwarded emails. It’s better to keep your signature as short as possible: two or three lines with a maximum of 80 characters per line (most email clients have a maximum width of 80 characters, so limit the length to avoid unsightly wrapping). Use the full signature for a new message to tell your recipient who you are, and a short one with your replies.
2. Make sure to include your name, your company, your position and how to get in touch with you.
3. Add personal Skype, IM, home phone, etc. ONLY if you really want to be contacted via them. Do include relevant corporate Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profile URLs.
4. Never use random quotes in your business emails. They may be good and funny for your friends and family, but you risk offending business associates with whom you don’t have a personal relationship.
5. Carefully use logos or other images. If you do use one, make it small and make it fit in aesthetically with the rest of the signature. Remember that most email clients store images as attachments or block them by default so think twice about whether you really need any.
6. With certain types of recipients, be careful of sending messages with HTML formatting because you’ll likely have problems with images and divider lines when the message is rendered in their email clients. With such people, it’s better to keep your signature as plain text.
7. Separate your signature from the message body with a line of —–, ======, or _______ or just a few spaces. This will visually separate your signature from your email.
8. Never include a legal disclaimer unless you are required to do so. If you do, keep it as short as possible.
9. Avoid including a line that your message was checked for viruses.
10. Remember that not every email user knows what a vCard is, so use one in your signature only if you tend to mail IT professionals. Recommend to your friends and colleagues that they use the EmailTray email client so they will always have a senders’ photo and info without having to also send a vCard.

_______
Aliona Vozna, the EmailTray Evangelist
www.emailtray.com

You may choose whether a Free EmailTray email client for Windows license is enough for you or choose a Premium License for 12 months, 36 months or forever.

You need the EmailTray email client for Windows Premium, if:

• Email is not only one of the communication channels for you, but your business tool. Use the EmailTray email client for Windows to have different signatures for your replies and forwarded emails as well as newly composed emails. EmailTray will add them automatically.
• You care about your personal data. Protect your EmailTray account with a password and be sure that all your email accounts, added to the EmailTray email client for Windows, are safe when you are away from your computer for a certain amount of time or when someone wishes to access the settings.

Note that all EmailTray users receive the following added benefits:

• You want to be safe from cybercrimes. The EmailTray email client marks known senders like PayPal, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. with the official icons, with these icons your passwords or credit card details will never be stolen.
• You want to know about important emails as soon as possible. EmailTray sorts the emails in your inbox according to the senders’ importance and notifies you about them. These notifications save you time, help you manage email efficiently, let you focus on important tasks and improve your email productivity.

• You want to work efficiently and do not want to waste time checking if any good email was trapped in the Spam folder by a mistake. The EmailTray email client for Windows solves the problem of  lost but good emails: it inspects the contents of the Spam folders of all your accounts for important messages and rescues good emails mistakenly trapped by email spam filters and sends them back to your Inbox.
• You want to manage your contact book easily. The EmailTray email client for Windows adds all contacts that you have correspondence with to your contact book automatically. But the best features of the EmailTray email client for Windows are the ability to merge the duplicate contacts in your contact book and synchronization of your EmailTray and Gmail contact books.

By the way, EmailTray software is available both as a Windows email client and an Android email app, so you can really make your emailing efficient and enjoyable.

In the previous post we told you about 5 simple rules that help you to protect yourself from cybercrimes and taught you how to protect your personal data. Today we want to continue the topic and show you the benefits of using the EmailTray email client for Windows for managing your emails and protecting yourself from spam and phishing.

The EmailTray email client for Windows recognizes senders and enriches your email communication with your contacts’ information from their social profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn. This helps you to detect valuable emails and ignore spam, while greatly decreasing your email overload.

Besides, the EmailTray email client for Windows will show the official icons for known senders like PayPal, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This official icons save you from phishing attacks, i.e. from the attempts to steal your passwords or credit card details. You can see the PayPal official icon on the image below.

In case a possibly spam email went to your inbox, the EmailTray email client marks it with a special warning, that attracts your attention. Now you can teach the EmailTray email client how to treat such emails in future.

Phishing emails, in their turn, are marked with bright warning sign. You will notice these for sure. And this is really important, because a mistake may cost you a lot. When the EmailTray email client for Windows suspects the email to be a phishing attempt, you will see this bright red warning.

We hope our recommendations and the EmailTray algorithm help you to avoid phishing attacks, save you from spam and make your email management easy and enjoyable.

Download and install the EmailTray email client for Windows and Androids and have an easy time dealing with your email communications and email overload.

In the previous post named 5 Ways to Make Email Work for You: Tips for Email SENDERS, we shared five email productivity and email deliverability tips for email senders. The next post of this series is meant for email recipients.
 

1. Automate send/receive from all your accounts

If you own several email addresses, it is wise to save time that you might have spent on checking each email account separately, including logging on to various Webmail services using your browser. Use one hub to track all email accounts via POP3 or IMAP. This can be a dedicated Gmail account or your favorite email client software.

Popular email clients include: Mozilla Thunderbird, MS Outlook, Windows Live Mail, EmailTray, IncrediMail, The Bat!, Pegasus Mail, Opera Mail. Some of them offer a range of useful tools for office task management, some add fancy pictures to your email signatures and some email clients offer email filtering and email sorting features.

The great news is that you can take advantage of the EmailTray email sorting features and use it absolutely free of charge. By the way, EmailTray, a young yet powerful email client, was ranked #3 by the About.com readers as one of the best Windows email programs in 2012:

Best Windows Email Program 2012 – The About.com 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards.

2. Attend to emails in priority order

Do you read and respond to emails according to the arrival time criteria (the oldest are attended to first, then come the rest of emails)? While you are looking through non-urgent emails like email subscriptions, payment receipts from e-stores and social network notifications, some really IMPORTANT emails might require immediate action!

In order to attend to emails in priority order, you most probably have to spend time on analyzing emails by importance and sorting them. The good news is that the EmailTray email client already has a built-in mechanism for email sorting based on your emailing habits, browsing history and privacy-oriented community intelligence.  With EmailTray, you won’t need to waste time on looking through all emails, deleting junk mail, archiving unimportant mail and singling out good mail. You’ll be able to focus on important emails residing under the “Top priority” and “Low priority” tabs of the EmailTray email client.

3. Do not respond to emails that are not addressed personally to you

Remember that it is not that necessary to reply to the emails which have a lengthy list of recipients in the “To:” or “CC:” fields. Some people have a nasty habit of sharing industry news, funny facts and other non-urgent stuff via email. They take advantage of the “send to all” or “reply to all” options and sometimes misuse them.

Email was not initially meant for broadcasting – there are a number of other useful tools for that such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other services. So treat those “broadcast emails” the way they are meant to be treated – read them when you have some spare time and don’t waste your time responding to them personally. To further save your time, you may wish to politely ask the sender if it’s possible to just follow their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ account and not receive emails.

4. Redirect your email communications to the other interaction channels

When appropriate, do your best to streamline your email communications to the other interaction channels according to your needs and situation. In case a matter is urgent and would definitely require several back-and-forth emails with questions and answers – think about dialing the sender and discussing things via phone. For efficient task management, you’d better use a good task management system. For group discussion, start a forum topic, post the info in a social network group or go for a chat room.

Learn more about different communication tools, their purposes, pros and cons from our infographic:

Communication Channels: Facts and Figures, Pros and Cons.

5. Keep your answers short

In the era of mobile devices, it is quite acceptable to fit your reply into one short sentence instead of a lengthy message.  Some people travel a lot and use their mobile phones to check mail most of the time, so you don’t take offence with them when they reply briefly, right?

By making your replies laconic, you actually save your time and the time of your recipients, so never hesitate to make your answer short whenever possible.

Any user friendly and popular email client should be excellent in the following ways:

-          it should be easily set up;

-          it should defend from spam;

-          it should notify users about important messages;

-          its contact book should be convenient.

The EmailTray email client for Windows has its own smart algorithm to conquer spam and it’s great in notifying users only about the emails that are worth their attention. Now it’s time to talk about the EmailTray contact book that has some unique features:

1. You need to do nothing to have your contact book fill with contacts.

EmailTray will fill your contact book for you. All contacts, that you have correspondence with, are automatically added to the contact book. Also, the contacts from all added email accounts are imported; plus you can import contacts from your LinkedIn and Facebook account if you wish.

2. The EmailTray contact book adds a “human face” to your inbox.

EmailTray tries to find and add a sender’s photo to the sender’s cards in your contact book (using Facebook or LinkedIn profile pictures, for example), but if there is still no photo or you want to change it, you can easily do this while editing your contacts’ details. These photos will be shown in your Inbox when you receive email from any particular sender and this will help you notice important messages faster.

3. With EmailTray your contacts information is always in order.

When EmailTray finds duplicate contacts in your contact book, it will merge them automatically. In case there are several contacts, for example, with identical full name but different titles, EmailTray will draw your attention to them and merge them in one contact card if you claim this to be the same person. This feature helps you keep your contact book in a perfect order.

4. Your EmailTray and Gmail contact books are always synchronized.

When you set EmailTray to sync your list of contacts with your Google contacts (please note that currently this is a beta option), you will never need to worry whether your contacts book is up-to-date. EmailTray will create the same groups you have in your Google account. With your contacts being synchronized in this way, you may be sure that important contact information is always within reach.

Our EmailTray development team believes that everything should grow and improve in the spring. And they implement this approach in our smart free email client development. That is why today we have some great news: both the EmailTray for PC and the EmailTray for Android email app have been updated.

What’s new in the EmailTray for Android email client app

The main changes in EmailTray for Android email client app have been about usability and the interface. Starting with widgets that have become neater and better looking, look out as well for an updated settings screen that is now even more intuitive. These changes are not all that noticeable at first sight, but they do make your experience more pleasant.

EmailTray on your mobile device is becoming more and more full-featured at a pace to be envied: now you can save a signature to be added to all your emails and cut the sender’s signature in a reply. This is great for quick and informal mobile email communications. Besides, more options for your unread email sorting were added and now you can arrange your emails in the most comfortable way.

As always, we are glad to get your comments and feedback!

What’s new in the EmailTray for Windows

First of all noticeable updates have been made to the EmailTray address book. Now it’s a full-featured address book that makes your contact management easy and quick. You can move contacts from multiple webmail accounts to the EmailTray email client with ease. An advanced data import system now includes the automated import of contacts from email accounts of major webmail providers, full data synchronization with Gmail Contacts and the on-demand import of contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn.

We all have our own ways to work with everyday email. EmailTray wants to make your everyday routine as pleasant and free from email overload as possible. That is why we give you freedom in choosing comfortable settings. Now you can arrange incoming messages not only by date or email account but also by sender. Changes were also made to your signature settings: you can not only set different signatures for a new letter and a reply/forward, but also have no signatures added.

EmailTray continues to care for your online safety: all suspicious, spam or phishing emails are marked with a special line, informing you about possible malicious content.

The support for major webmail service providers has been improved. Now the support of IMAP accounts features instant notification on new mail, i.e. you will know about new important messages the moment they appear in your webmail Inbox. So there will be no need to check your email every minute, while you wait for something important that you expect.

As it has been said previously, one of our main goals is your data safety. Now you can backup your EmailTray mail database including: all messages (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Archive), your address book, your signatures and all possible settings (list of your configured accounts, custom rules, your business card, alerts, etc.). Moving to another PC or laptop? Restore your mail data from the backup file and proceed with your work without delay.

What is effective email management? It’s having your emails organized, responding to them in a neat and timely manner, never losing important emails and having no stress at work because of a cluttered Inbox (email overload). See below five elements which make the process of email management more effective and worry-free.

Element #1: Track all mail in one place

How many active email accounts do you run? Three, five, ten, or even more? Let’s give it a count.
First, you surely have at least one personal email address to communicate with your friends and relatives.
Second, you most probably use a corporate email address for your business. If you run several business projects you will be using several corporate email addresses, right?
Also, most of us have a couple of extra email addresses used for online subscriptions, one-time registrations, trials, etc. You do not expect any important messages from these email accounts but you still have to check them from time to time – to confirm online registrations, get your promotion codes and download links, etc.

It’s a wise thing to use an email client to manage multiple email accounts from one place, preferably offline as well as when your computer or mobile device is connected to the Internet. You will need to choose software that runs on your operation system and supports all email services and protocols that you deal with – including most popular Webmail providers (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail), POP3 and IMAP. If you use the Windows OS or an Android smartphone, the EmailTray email client could be of great help here.

Element #2: Classify emails according to their priority

Before you start dealing with your emails, it is important to classify messages according to their priority – to be able to attend to them in a priority order. Thus, will need to separate the wheat from the chaff – so that you can focus on the most important emails first and reply to urgent messages quickly.

The process of email sorting traditionally includes three important steps:

• Deleting spam messages from your Inbox
• Sorting the rest of the emails by priority: urgent and most important first, less important to come next – including news, subscriptions, payment checks, etc.
• Revising the contents of the Spam folder – just in case any good messages have been mistakenly trapped by spam filters.

You can do all this by hand, several times a day, taxing your brain and wasting your time. Or you could delegate spam detection and email sorting jobs to email productivity tools – to free up your brain and your hands and save valuable time. See Element # 5 in this list for more details on email productivity tools.

Element #3: Unsubscribe from what you no longer read

Unsubscribe from the newsletters and services you no longer need or read. Are you a parent of a grown-up kid? That probably means that you no longer need a subscription to your favorite kids clothing store where you used to shop several years ago… Reading too many newsletters on the same topic and coming across the same entries often? Stay subscribed to those that cover the events most efficiently, and say good-bye to those who copy-paste.

A bad habit of being subscribed to “everything I might possibly need in the future” eats up your time and productivity. Email overload has been recognized as a serious hindrance to getting things done in the corporate world and in modern personal lives. So find a day to run a detox hour with all of your email subscriptions and unsubscribe from those that clutter up your Inbox and add no value to your everyday life.

Element #4: Keep your answers short and neat

It is for the benefit of you and your email recipients to deal with emails as quickly as possible. So keep your answers short and value your time and the time of people you communicate with.

Tip: Use email signatures to save an extra minute on typing salutation and your name at the bottom of the email message. The good news is that most of the advanced email clients will give you a possibility to create different email signatures for each individual email account.

Element #5: Use email productivity tools

As mentioned above, if you value your time, make sure to use smart productivity tools to automate email management jobs. It is not enough to have all your email messages aggregated in one place. It’s important to have your emails organized.

For example, you could take advantage of the smart email filtering feature offered by the EmailTray email client. It will detect the emails which are important for you because of your email habits and give you the option of dealing with these messages first. EmailTray is also capable of rescuing important email messages mistakenly trapped by spam filters, so you can forget about the problem of missed emails!

A good email contact management system will sync across various devices (desktop, smartphone, notebook) and keep all your email contacts in one place.

It would also be cool to set up your mail client to alert you to the most important emails only, not to each and every email. Can your favorite email client do this for you? EmailTray can, so grab your copy of the EmailTray free email client now!

Recently the EmailTray for Android app v1.2 was released. You can install it from Google Play or update your installed application. The best thing about this update is that the Android-application is now as good in rescuing good emails from the Spam folder as the desktop EmailTray already is.

Why do you need to rescue something from the Spam folder?

You surely use spam filters to protect yourself from being distracted by nonsense. But these spam filters, unfortunately, make mistakes and bury the emails you need to answer in the Spam folder.

Nobody wants to look through thousands of emails proposing that you buy a Rolex replica or that you help a Nigerian princess rob her country just so you don’t miss something important. And EmailTray is here to help you with that: it’s much more than a spam filter.

Our approach to the problem of excessive spam and information overload is innovative and effective: instead of putting suspicious emails into the Spam folder, the EmailTray email client picks your important emails out of the spam folder and puts them into Top and Low priority folders. When a spam filter puts an important email into the Spam folder by mistake, EmailTray is likely to notice this, with the help of special smart algorithm, and rescue it.

Now you can use the advantages of this approach on your Android-based mobile device. Let’s celebrate this with a cocktail. And the best cocktail, we are sure, is using both the EmailTray for Android app and the EmailTray for your PC.

Why is it the best choice to put EmailTray both on your mobile device and on your desktop?

A mobile device in your pocket is a working tool that is always available. We are sure you will begin to enjoy our approach to your inbox and would like to use EmailTray both on your mobile device and on your desktop. Use the same EmailTray account for both platforms. That way, if you mark someone as a spammer on your mobile phone or quickly write them back, we’ll know how to handle these senders on your other platforms (and IMAP mail will be marked read or deleted when you get to work in the morning). This will help you to get the most from EmailTray’s smart ranking algorithm. With one EmailTray account you can install EmailTray on any device and have your emails sorted from the first launching. It doesn’t matter what you choose: the original EmailTray, the all new EmailTray Beta (link expired), or the EmailTray for Android email client; you may be sure that your inbox will always be in order.