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5 Tips to Make Your Gmail Faster
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If the numbers from ComScore – thanks to The Verge — are anything to go by, Gmail is officially the universal, “this one will do for everything” inbox for 425 million active users around the world.
Given that backdrop, you’d be forgiven to think that you and almost everyone you know would be using Gmail in one variation or the other: Gmail could be used as personal email, could be the default Inbox for fetching POP3 and webmail, or from the push Gmail gets even from enterprise users who rely on Google Apps.
Numbers aside, you’d obviously love it if Gmail could work faster, load better, and basically let you have the best experience possible. If you use Gmail, here are a few ways you could optimize your Gmail experience:
Search with Cloud Magic
How would it be if you could do a single search across your multiple “alcoves” – say on Gmail itself, Evernote, Mac’s Cloud, Outlook, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, on the cloud and find almost anything you needed, just when you need them the most? Working on the premise of “previews” – defined as one click on a search result that lets you get a snapshot of what you were looking for — CloudMagicfetches what you seek off the cloud (For the free plan, you get 50 previews and the Pro account gets you unlimited previews).
If you ever needed a faster way to dig into the information that already exists within your cloud, flitting through your multiple cloud storage options is outdated. With CloudMagic, view and act on your search results – performed across your cloud – without ever leaving the app.
Ditch Gmail Labs & Uninstall unused browser extensions
We concur with Barb Dybwad of entrepreneur.com who suggested disabling Gmail labs. Gmail labs does have a few neat tools to manage your Gmail Inbox better but you don’t really need to have it working on the background, as it actually does. When you have to check out a new feature, enable labs and play around with new tools but until then, keep labs disabled.
Further, disable any browser extensions you don’t really use much. If anything, your browser could be slowing your Gmail experience (and possibly even your computer’s capabilities). The Guardian points to the fact that browser extensions self-apportion a part of computer memory termed as “SandBox” which affects your browser and then your computer resources.
You don’t always need “Conversation View” on
Liane Cassavoy of PCworld.com goes all out and announces her hatred for Conversation View on Gmail. The “Conversion view” admittedly helps you unclutter your inbox and many users do benefit from a threaded view. Yet, it’s not without problems.
Liane points to a few problems with Conversation Views on Gmail: your Inbox stays uncluttered, and the emails are more relevant while the conversations themselves get messy. Bring in a few more people into your email loop and you’ll have chaos ruling your inbox. Working with teams can be a nightmare with “Conversation View“ on.
Further, conversation views aren’t always necessary. It only makes sense then to turn it off when you don’t need to so as to enhance your email load time and also speed up search within email inbox.
Whether you love it or hate it, the Gmail team understands. Wiltse Carpenter – Technical Lead on Gmail – helpfully pointed out how to turn off Gmail conversation view.
Sometimes, you’d just need the right browser
You sure disabled browser extensions, turned off conversations, and even cleared your browsers’ cache memory. If all of that isn’t helping, you might just have to switch browsers. Google Chrome, Rick Maybury of The Telegraph promptly suggests, is a better browser for Gmail than any other. Rick also points to Gmail Mobile version as a great alternative because it’s stripped down version devoid of anything fancy.
Use Filters and Reduce Labels
If Gmail has to work faster, it has to be lean and mean. Google suggests using filters for emails.
Using filters automatically helps you to sort, delete, archive, star, or forward emails. Filters might even keep you out of the time (and soul) sucking spam zone while allowing you to apply labels.
Talking about labels, here’s the important bit: don’t overdo it. Too many labels — including nested ones – can drastically slow down Gmail. Google suggests limiting the total number of labels to 5000 at any time.
If you have to use labels to collaborate, check out GrexIt and sign-up.
How do you optimize your Gmail usage? Please share your ideas with us.
