We’ve added a super handy button to the Mailbird interface since bringing POP3 support into the picture.

What is awesome is that now you can manage even more email accounts from one place in Mailbird. When you first sync a POP3 email account with Mailbird, all your emails will populate your inbox for that account. Most likely, you’ve already read those newly downloaded POP3 emails and you just need to clean the old batch of emails from your inbox.

You can now mark all of those emails as “read” in one go, and start with a fresh clean slate with your newly added POP3 accounts in Mailbird.

Alternately, that same “Mark all as read button” unlocks an “Empty folder” option when you are in your Spam or Trash folders.

Before you could still accomplish deleting all Spam and Trash emails by using Ctrl or Shift to multi-select emails and moving to Trash or Spam. Now, it’s just a little easier.

The post The “Mark all as read” button appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

We are super pumped to hear Satya Nadella stepping up as Microsoft’s new CEO (and they haven’t had many). We hope to see stronger support for improved productivity tools on the Windows platform. Just as Microsoft is a very international company, as you have maybe heard before, Mailbird team is an international team from Denmark, Indonesia, Colombia and USA.

We speak many different languages and are always seeking ways to improve productivity for people everywhere. Originally we were going to only develop Mailbird in English, but after we saw tons of requests and support for it in many different languages we decided to go for it.  The first version of Mailbird with multi-language support has arrived thanks to all our loyal fans and contributors across the globe, you guys are the best. Bringing you the best email client for Windows.

Did you know that even before the full multi-language support release, Mailbird already had spell check support for 11 languages, 12 if you count UK English as a separate language.

“I have tried a lot of email clients such as Thunderbird and many others. I got stuck with Roundcube webmail and then I read about Mailbird. It has a beautiful interface and works perfectly with IMAP. But the reason why I still use Mailbird is the conversation view which saves a lot of time searching for emails. Why I want to translate Mailbird? It’s an awesome piece of software and I want to support it.” – Lars Pech, German Translator and power user for Mailbird

We received lots of people who wanted to help the project by translating Mailbird voluntarily that was awesome. At first we thought to go with a translation service provider. Instead we thought it would be so much more valuable for us to be able to learn and engage with you, the users. Thank you for being just as pumped up as we are about Mailbird this year, and for being so willing to help make Mailbird available in your native language.

The thing you don’t realize about translation on both the website and in the software, there is a lot more stuff to translate than you would think. Every menu, tip, suggestion, name, error reporting pop-up, every field needs to be translated. The great part about having actual Mailbird users contribute to multi-language support, is that they are using the app. They know it very well and have be awesome with translating the software.

We were surprised at how responsive users were in contributing to the localization effort in Mailbird. Many of our international users offered their help without us even asking. We are so thankful for our translation heroes and Mailbird super stars. Yes we are talking about Michał Jakubowski, Konrad Rymczak, Stella Haun, Lars Pech, Tim, Mikkel Andreasen, Andrew Levchenko, Arkady Gaidarji, Héctor Solís Andrade, Daniel Maciel, José Renato, Rogério Filho, Fernando Santos, Valerio Francescangeli, Bruno Schellino, Manuel Debaux, Alain Besancon, Ruben Coolen, Anna Berlee, Leonardo Santoso, Radoslav Danev, Johan Franzén, Marius Baesu and many more who will join.

What languages will be supported in version 1 of multi-language support? We decided to make life easier for those who prefer to use an email client in their native language, and when I say “we”, I mean the eight of us working directly in building the app, plus the 36 Mailbird users who are helping us to translate Mailbird to the first 14 additional languages Mailbird will support.

• English (source language)
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Swedish
• Italian
• Danish
• Dutch
• Bulgarian
• Romanian
• Spanish
• Turkish

It has not been an easy task, but our team is dedicated to bringing the best alternative email client on Windows to the world. First we wanted to find a web tool to be able to share every update and notify users about changes and news and thanks we found Transifex that has made this process so easy for both users and developers. They have a great deal for startups as well as great costumer support.

These heroes helped us updating the website first and then they took the time to translate the whole app. We remember Alain (French version) saying that it took him only 3 hours to do the first round, then we started getting more requests for other languages like Portuguese. We have many Brazilian users that simply love Mailbird. German, Dutch, Polish and Russian teams work extremely fast every time we update the source file too.

Third, we had to adjust Mailbird interface to make it look great in other languages; our developers took the time to recheck every window and control to make sure all the content fit perfectly no matter which language you used. We upgraded our installer everything was crystal clear from the time you download the app in your native language.

So how to try Mailbird in your native language?

1. Open your Mailbird email client
2. Click on the Mailbird drop down menu at the top left corner of the app window
3. Click ‘Options’
4. Click the ‘Advanced’ tab
5. At the bottom of the ‘Advanced’ tab select your ‘Application language’
6. Restart Mailbird
7. Voila! Mailbird is now in your language of choice.

It has been very rewarding for our team to have the opportunity to work with these awesome people; some took the time to translate and some others to review. Some were really fast and effective, while others were perfectionists.  Your questions improved many other things in Mailbird as well. We know that the result may not be 100% perfect in the first version, and you may even see some not-so-critical parts still in English. Please let us know if you find any errors in translation when testing Mailbird in your language of choice.

One of our wonderful Bulgarian translators, Radoslav Danev says,

“From the days I first started using computers, emails have always been one of my main tools of communication and I always found it difficult and time consuming to constantly go through the browser every time to check if there’s a new email. I’ve used Thunderbird, the default mail client in Windows and others not so popular programs but none of them was able to grab my eye and be my main email client for very long. All this changed the day I installed Mailbird. The simplicity of the app just grabbed me. The emails were the main focus (unlike some others) and everything was lined up perfectly. I was pleasantly surprised when I found the apps – from Mailbird I was able to visit my contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Evernote and other services, which further facilitated my work and saved me time. Altogether I don’t think I’ll be able to use other email client than that one. I’m sure you won’t be as well, once you try it yourself.”

Since this is the first release of multi-language support, we are dedicated to continuously improving translations in different languages. We will continue to improve and translate every single word, sentence and paragraph to make Mailbird just as professional in other languages as it is in English. We welcome more people who’d like to help translate Mailbird. This is just the beginning to making Mailbird a truly global email solution on the Windows platform. We are truly excited about the opportunities here for current  and new users, making Mailbird more and more accessible to people around the world.

Want to support Mailbird in your native language? You can register to support language translation here: http://www.getmailbird.com/donation-2/ and select “Translation Service” as the donation type. When the beta is over, as a big thank you, we are giving away Mailbird Pro free for life to our translators.

We are also very excited that Windows announced bringing metro apps to the desktop, just goes to show that the desktop is still winning and an email client is the way to go for managing workload and productivity. We are getting better and better at bringing productivity to the world, and you can read more about how we are doing that with the awesomeness of Mailbird here.

At last, from our localization project manager Caro and the rest of the Mailbird team, thanks to everybody around the world working on this feature. Thank you for all the support and for helping us make Mailbird more available for users around the world.

Want to learn about the international support for the best alternative email client for Windows and to see how Mailbird looks in different languages? Check out the internationalism of Mailbird below.

Japanese

http://goo.gl/vm09ii

Spanish

http://www.omicrono.com/2013/04/mailbird-gmail-en-tu-escritorio-con-todas-sus-funciones/

French

http://www.viceup.com/actualite/alternative-a-thunderbird-et-outlook-client-mail-windows/

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xyo1zb_freshnews-409-3-millions-pour-feedly-facebook-home-sur-htc-myst-mailbird-02-04-2013_tech

Indonesian (Bahasa)

Mailbird in Indonesia Leading Technology Magazine, Chip Magazine

Danish (Dansk)

German (Deutsch)

Russian

Swedish (Svenska)

Italian

http://www.geekissimo.com/2013/04/01/mailbird-nuovo-splendido-client-email-windows/

Portuguese

Get Mailbird Pro today and click here. We promise you’ll love it.

From the bottom of our hearts from the whole Mailbird team,

Thank you, Tack, Gracias, Merci, Terima Kasih, Dzięki, Obrigado, Cпасибо, Grazie, Tac, Dank, благодаря, Mulțumiri, and Teşekkürler!

The post An Email Client Localizing and Connecting the World through Language appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Overwhelmed

Are you someone who when you feel tired or overwhelmed with your work, you start checking emails instead? Why do we do this? It is the same reason why we start with small simple tasks rather than the tougher, more complicated ones. A lot of productivity gurus suggest starting with your most difficult or time consuming task first thing in the morning. However, this can be tough for many of us as we crave that immediate satisfaction of being able to complete things, meaning we go for the easy wins. Checking and processing emails is one of those activities.

Don’t Replace Real-time Communication

A common recommendation is to not check email in the morning, but to rather batch it and schedule time to process email 2-3 times throughout the day. It is important to remind ourselves that the world still goes on when we ignore emails, and to instead handle them during specific and dedicated times. This also encourages people to contact you in real-time with urgent matters.

Inbox Checking Addiction

However we know many of you don’t like this structure for managing emails, and prefer to constantly check email to maintain a clean inbox with no emails and by dealing with emails immediately – which is ok as long as your day is not over-taken by email.

For some of us, we may not need to separate email from real work, but accept that it is a part of work and building professional relationships in the exchange of information. This is great as long as we can remain effective with email. We know, it feels good to check email, but what about the rest of your time and how it can be spent wisely? We quickly realized that there are small wins in a stress-free email hub that achieves true inbox bliss.

Shhhh…

So for you, here are the best kept email secrets regardless of your email management style:

1) Speed Reader At least 50% of online reading is spent reading emails. What if you could cut that time in half? Use the Mailbird email speed reader to get through reading your emails in half the time.

2) Quick Compose This is a keyboard shortcut that you can create to compose an email anytime in a fly, whether Mailbird is the active window or not. This is great for when you just remember to email someone after browsing a website and you quickly want to send them a link to that website. Or maybe you are working in a word document and you have a question from your colleague. You don’t need to open Mailbird so it is the active window, just use your keyboard shortcut to start composing.

3) In-line Reply Let’s say you finish speed reading an email and there are important and specific points you need to reply to. Using in-line reply gives you and contacts in your email conversation a well-organized response that is easy to follow, with automatic color coding and your name stamped wherever you hit enter in your senders email to reply to that specific point. This of course can also be customized from the Options menu under the Advanced tab to whatever color and text stamp to distinguish your responses from the sender’s original email content.

4) Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts, even for those who are used to mouse point and click interactions are actually a very rewarding way to speed up email management. You can use “R” for replying, “L” to label an email to a designated folder, “F” to forward an email, “Ctrl + Shift + P” to print, “Delete” to move emails to trash, “E” to archive and much more. Best of all if you use Gmail keyboard shortcuts, many of them are already supported in Mailbird – making it much easy to learn. To see how much faster you can get to reaching inbox zero using keyboard shortcuts, check them out by hitting Shift + ? to see all the available shortcuts.

5) LinkedIn Lookup This is ideal for people who really use email as an integral part of their work where they are building professional relationships. Right click on any email contact and select “Look up on LinkedIn”. This automatically looks that email contact up on LinkedIn so you can build a stronger connection with that person, especially if they are a business contact. This is really a bonus to staying socially connected via the Mailbird Facebook app.

6) Multi-account support The main reason why many people opt for a desktop email client is so they can manage several different email accounts from one place from different email servers. Imagine never having to worry about remembering another email login and password, or the internet cutting out, or adjusting to different email interfaces and all the features that matter to help improve your experience with email. Multi-account support allows you to also customize your accounts with different icons, and multi-identities allows you to send from any email address from any one account. It’s one place to handle all your email. Multi-account support allows Mailbird to be your email hub. You can learn more about why desktop email is better than web email here.

7) Action Bar This is a definite dynamic addition to managing your inbox. When you hover over the profile picture of your contact in the message list a bar slides out to the right giving you the options to Archive, Reply, Forward, Trash, Mark as important, Mark as starred, Mark as read or unread and Mark as spam. So if you are a point and click type of person, this is a great way to manage your emails immediately, otherwise you may be one of the keyboard shortcut efficient email users as noted in #4 above. Finally, you can easily archive emails my either clicking and holding down on a profile picture and dragging to the right and the bar turns Green to confirm your email will be archived. Alternately if you have an email that is archived or in a folder, you can move it back to the inbox using the same gesture only the bar turns Blue to confirm the email is moved back to the inbox and will be tagged with Inbox. For laptop users, you can use the touch pad mouse to archive or move emails back to the inbox using two fingers and swiping them from left to right on the touch pad mouse. Pretty awesome.

8) Profile Pic Search For those of you who don’t follow the inbox zero philosophy of cleaning out all emails from your inbox, all your problems are solved as long as you have an awesome search function that allows you to search for any content in emails like subject, content and sender. You might say “Who needs to delete or archive when I can find any email through a robust search algorithm in my email?” and maybe you don’t feel any positive benefit for ridding your inbox of all emails as soon as they arrive. Search is the answer to your email woe’s, and still allows you to process emails in the most productive manner ever. You can even search for attachments, keyboard shortcuts, apps, contacts, folder labels and much more. The really special search function that seems to shine is the ability to search for all emails from one contact in one click, working as an instant filter. Click the profile picture of your contact in the message list pane and magically all emails from that person appear in the message list pane. This email secret is perfect for referencing older email exchanges between you and your contact.

9) The  Apps This is a very special part of Mailbird that allows you to use Mailbird as one place to get work done. To view the current prototypes of Mailbird apps click on the three dots at the bottom of the navigation pane. This will open the apps currently available. To turn them on simply click or slide the on/off switch for the app you’d like to use. Once you do this, it will appear on the far left navigation pane. Click on it to activate and enjoy a whole new dynamic inbox with awesome apps like Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Asana and much more.

Customizing Your Life

So we understand that we all have different email management methods, and no one or the other is right or wrong. Instead Mailbird allows you to customize your email experience through many effective features that help you feel good again by reaching a clean or simply more manageable inbox. Less stress and more time for the rest of your life!

Why doesn’t every email client have these?

The post Best Kept Email Secrets appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Despite the heightened induced stress upon sitting down at your desk to check email, there are solutions. A lot of these productivity fixes occur with habit changes in how you manage email, but why not have an email client that is actually enjoyable to use and makes email management much more effective?

What if your email client offered you the best tools so that email was actually fun, productive and didn’t cause a brain aneurysm?

Step 1 – Get Mailbird

Download and install Mailbird, the best email client for Windows. Don’t take our word for it, IT World and PC World both think so too.

Download Now

Step 2 – Watch it in Action

Watch this video, so you know exactly what to expect and what to do when you launch Mailbird.

You can also read about the key features in Mailbird on our blog here.

Step 3 – Improve Your Email Habits, Reduce Stress

Here’s the part that involves changing your email habits. Try these and make your way to experiencing a better way to email.

1. Don’t start the day with your inbox. Instead work first on the things you have scheduled the day before, take control of what gets done in your day to stay productive by doing a little day-before planning. Your inbox shouldn’t dictate what you do in your day.
2. Batch process emails. Set dedicated times to process emails and deal with them during that time immediately, close your email when you are getting things done.
3. Create an inbox system. Deal with the emails right away, don’t let them sit in your inbox. Delete them if you don’t need to do anything with them. Archive them if you would like to reference them later. Reply/Forward/Delegate the actions requested in your email. Otherwise add them to your calendar, to do list or task list. Try using Asana and Google Calendar which are both available with Mailbird apps (the three dots in the bottom left of the main Mailbird window).
4. Use one email platform to manage all emails. Mailbird offers multi-account support which is awesome for maintaining one hub for all your email communication. Instructions to setting it up are here.
5. Send less email = get less email. This is just true, and a matter a realizing that email is not always the appropriate channel of communication. You can easily minimize emails by walking over to your colleague and asking a question or have a discussion about next steps in your joint goals and tasks. It’s also ok to pick up the phone sometimes to talk things through with your co-worker, business partner or client.
6. Use the “5 Sentence Rule”. This forces you to get to the point and communicate much more efficiently and effectively.
7. Use “EOM” which stands for “End of Message” in your subject lines. Should you want to give a quick update to someone via email, put the main point in the subject line and an EOM at the end to indicate that was all the info.
8. Unsubscribe to newsletters that you end up spending more of your time deleting anyways. Remove that step and unsubscribe to those newsletters that only create more “noise” in your inbox.
9. Don’t let long email conversations go on forever, end them preemptively for things like scheduling appointments where you can suggest a time and let the other person know that you assume that works unless they reply otherwise. You could also offer suggested times that provide your free time so the other person can pick the one that works for both of you.
10. Speed read your emails and cut the time spent on this in half. Have you heard of the 2 minute rule coined by David Allen on Getting Things Done? Basically, you only manage or take action with email if it takes 2 mins or less. If not you add it to your to do list for later or use starring or important flag features to remind you to follow up with those emails at a later time if it takes more than 2 mins. Well, we challenge that you throw that idea out the window and process every email in your inbox during dedicated times, immediately. You can cut the time in half using the first Email Speed Reader and cut email replies so they are short and succinct using Mailbird’s special In-line Reply feature.

Habits take time to change, so don’t wait any longer. Try implementing some of these strategies now, if you haven’t already, and start to see an improvement in your manageability and relationship with email. Also here is a bonus, a fantastic resource to help you along the way with discovering better email management with Mailbird here.

Email is one of the best communication tools used today, and over time we’ve learned to abuse it. By improving your email habits and using an awesome email client that helps you take control of your time again, you will see a significant increase in your productivity.

Remember it’s not crazy if you get through your emails, its crazy if you don’t.

The post Email, it’s not so bad. appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

“This could change your inbox forever.”

To just say “keep your emails short” really isn’t specific enough for you to actually follow this piece of inbox management advice. Instead we invite you to the 5 sentence email challenge, meaning emails you compose or reply to should not be more than 5 sentences long.

Free up more time in your work day to stay productive, improve how you communicate, while influencing better and less frequent emails in your inbox.

In our last Blog post titled “Email, it’s not so bad.” we mention the 5 Sentence Email Rule as tip #6. This is a brilliant philosophy and takes some practice. It all falls back to how email is mismanaged today, and new thing we can do to make it much better for us. According to the August 14, 2014 post on The Atlantic, “Email is still the best thing on the internet” so let’s see how we can evolve with the fast ever-changing environment of information exchange, so it isn’t such a hassle to manage the constant influx of electronic messages flooding our inbox.

5 Sentence Email?

We investigate the 5 sentence email strategy to see if it is appropriate for business email correspondence. The easy answer is, that there is no definite rule when handling new emails or when replying to emails. Simply take the time to consolidate info in your emails to 5 sentences or less. By Guy Kawasaki’s standard (the man who coined the 5 sentence email philosophy), you can easily do this by answering…

1) Who are you?

2) What do you want?

3) Why are you asking me?

4) Why should I do what you’re asking?

5) What is the next step?

Guy says, “This is all an intelligent person needs to know to make a decision.” 

There are many circumstances where limiting your emails by number of sentences is too restrictive depending on the nature of information you are communicating, but not if you can answer the 5 questions above. The idea here is to eliminate a ton of back and forth, and to answer all the potential questions and offer suggestions to the person you are emailing. You can even include in your email signature to encourage this new email culture and habit explaining you are improving your efficiency and productivity with short emails using 5 sentences or less, and request the response is also 5 sentences or less. Or, just use this 5 Sentences email tool. Then of course there are exceptions for the extra details. 

Leaving out the extra details.

What do we mean by extra details? Which ones can you leave out and which ones are ok to keep, even if it exceeds the 5 sentence strategy? Well some emails require a lot of specific information needed for the email recipient to take the next steps – again referencing question #5 above. In this case, give all the necessary info directly and succinctly. The details you can always keep include any kind of positive encouragement, praise or recognition of the recipient’s hard work and good will. You also can never say thank you enough, and this all ties into our strong belief in integrating happiness in our work and personal lives.

Why do it?

The great thing about keeping emails short, especially if you are a small business looking to utilize email marketing, is that you are much more likely to engage with the person you are emailing and get a clear response and action. Many of us have a bad habit of writing out our thought process in emails, I even do it. If that is your process, so be it. However it is necessary to then take the next steps and re-read your email and see how you can cut it down to a clear conclusion and ensuring you directly answered the 5 questions. Even better if you can achieve this in less than 5 sentences.

The recipient of your email does not need to spend their time reading through your convoluted thought process, save them and yourself time by keeping emails short and to the point with direct action and next steps. Communicate what the recipient needs to know, cut the extra email “fat” (a.k.a. unnecessary filler sentences) with a well thought-out and very clear way of communicating via email. Remember, it’s just email and it’s still the best thing on the internet. Reduce the time you spend emailing when you follow this email management strategy – it’s awesome! You’ll see the difference right away. We promise.

No, this isn’t for me!

Now for those of you who turn your head at this strategy, the Mailbird team knows, old habits are hard to break. So what we’ve done for you took the extra time and care to help you effectively reply to emails with Mailbird’s special In-line Reply feature. If you don’t have time to thoughtfully cut your emails to 5 sentences or less, then using this kick ass email client, you can reply directly to all pertinent points with In-line Reply. It’s a win-win for you and the person you email, making life easier with fast, convenient and well organized email replies.

We hope this helps you stay focused so you get email done, keeps your inbox under control and your communication much more effective while building a much healthier relationship with your email.

Tell us your “short email” strategy.

Have you tried other clever short email strategies? If so, share with us in the comments below what works and what does not for you.

If you don’t think the short email movement is the way to go, then try the In-line Reply feature in Mailbird and tell us what you think about it’s effect on your focus, productivity and efficiency in email communication below.

The post Why You Should Keep Emails Short appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Knowing and recognizing crappy email habits is the first step to recovery

Have you seen the best email etiquette and habits we shared here?

So let’s look at the problems we as human beings have developed in our many years of using email – literally the greatest innovation to how our species communicates and exchanges information in this world today, in the most efficient manner ever. You’ve heard of Clint Eastwood’s classic Western film “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”? Well instead we are going to take a deep nose dive first into the Bad and the Ugly…then close it off with the Good side of email.

The Bad & Ugly

1) You CC everyone and your mom on an email that is really on an as-needed basis. This in turn convolutes the discussion and many of us are not in practice of understanding the purpose of CC which is to be informed with no further action needed – a lot of times this is never the case and most of the time we are only cluttering the inboxes of our colleagues.

2) Writing out your full thoughts without a concise and direct message that doesn’t waste anyone’s time.

3) Get pissed because you never got a response. Email is an asynchronous form of communication and people are busy. Re-evaluate to see if maybe a response needed was not clear or give the person a reasonable amount of time to read the email and set their priorities to responding. We should never expect an immediate response to an email – if you need an immediate response, pick up the phone or walk over and speak in person.

4) Not letting the other person know you received their email. It is common courtesy to just let the other person know that you got their email. You can be even more awesome if you send an email and put NRN which stands for “no response needed” in the subject line, letting the receiver know they don’t need to reply.

5) Don’t BCC to be sneaky, vindictive or spiteful. Email is not meant to be the tool for throwing people under the bus and BCC’s should be used as intended and most appropriately for introductions where perhaps you thank the sender for the intro and BCC them so they are no longer included in the email conversation moving forward.

6) You hit “Reply” instead of “Reply to All” when the communication is intended to be for all participants in the email conversation.

7) Forgetting to attach a file. Just goes back to taking the time to read your email before you send it. Many email clients like Mailbird will remind you if the word “attachment” is anywhere in the email conversation before it sends. This is super helpful especially when you get in the habit of writing the word “attachment” in your emails if there is one – directing the recipient’s attention to files attached that they should view.

8) Not answering emails when they have direct questions is rude. Be kind and reply, it doesn’t have to be immediately when you receive an email depending on the time sensitivity of the matter but a general rule of thumb to reply within 24 hours is always good to follow during normal Monday through Friday business hours. Auto-reply messages are perfect for this when you will be away for an extended period and will not have access to email.

9) Abusing the word “URGENT!” in your subject lines. If it is truly an urgent matter, find a real time method of contacting that person like picking up the phone.

10) Signatures that go on and on. Keep your signatures short and sweet – no one wants to read a never ending paragraph of favorite quotes and your company description, this simply causes clutter.

11) Using emoticons when not appropriate. Some people say don’t use emoticons, particularly for professional emails – this is where you have to pick up on communication queues and tone. Some people like it when they feel they are talking to a human being with emotions, so a smiley face every now and again, when appropriate is acceptable. However if the person you are emailing is not so keen on sharing emotions via email using smiley’s then maintain that more structured communication method which we would perhaps consider more professional.

That’s 11 bad email habits that we’ve all been guilty of, and there are sure many other email faux pas that have been committed. What are some bad email habits you’ve had? Tell us in the comments below.

The Good

This past week we shared on various social channels some good email habits to follow that will make email a whole lot better for you. So here is a recap of what you should do with email.

1) Write emails in such a way that eliminate a never ending loop of back and forth, you might as well pick up the phone and have a real time conversation if you cannot close the final action steps after the correspondence.

2) Take the time to write short emails by giving yourself the 5 sentence rule. Get your information across, if possible, in 5 sentences or less – this forces you to really read through your email and cut out the things that only add clutter and more back and forth correspondence. The goal should be to get to the point and know exactly what action to take next for both you and the person or people you are emailing. Read more on why shorter emails are better here.

3) Use spell check. There is a reason why it is there, so save yourself the embarrassment of seeming sloppy or unprofessional and spell check before hitting Send.

4) Schedule times to go through your email and don’t start the day with email. Instead plan your morning the day before and get started on that plan first thing.

5) Triage your emails so you can work towards inbox zero (a.k.a. clearing out all emails from your inbox) so you take action with them as you go through them during a scheduled time – again not first thing in the morning. To triage you go through each one and either reply, archive or delete the email. It’s all about taking action and not pushing anything off. Triage, triage, triage. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not a second more. Triage – from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select. Take control of your email, and don’t allow your inbox to clutter.

6) Apply the 4 D’s to your inbox…
– Do it
– Drop it
– Delegate it
– Defer it
Get to inbox zero every day.

7) Only CC people if they need to be in the email convo. The main difference between the TO: field and the CC: filed, is the intent. CC (aka Carbon Copy) should be used when you want to keep someone in the loop but no action is required AND all parties know the address.

8) Use formatting to make your emails easy to scan.

9) Proof read your emails before sending. This will help you cut out pieces that are unclear or unnecessary while also improving those occasional spelling or grammatical slips every now and again.

10) Keep an email focused on ONE topic that can be communicated clearly.

11) Be polite and to the point. There’s really no need for all that extra fluff in your emails. If you are polite and to the point, you are showing you genuinely respect that person’s time.

12) Sometimes it’s better to just pick up the phone and call.

13) Make your email actionable.

Time to make a change if you are guilty of any of the bad and ugly Email Faux Pas. Move forth now with these great tips which are exemplary of what great email habits really are. Share this if you know someone who needs these better email habits.

To close, here’s a happy ending to the good side of email. We ask, “Can email be beautiful?” We think so, and so does Phillip Dews. 

The post Guilty Of These Email Faux Pas? appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Un-install Mailbird
Uninstalling Mailbird is done the usual way, from ‘Programs and Features’ if using Windows 7 for instance.

The post How to Un-install Mailbird appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Downloading Mailbird…

Your Mailbird download should automatically start within seconds after hitting the Download button. If it doesn’t, restart the download.

Having any problems getting set up? Here are the solutions to every installation problem.

1. Run the Mailbird installer Click on the .exe file that just downloaded in your browser.

 

2. Follow setup instructions Follow the instructions to get Mailbird installed on your computer!

 

3. Click ‘Yes’ Click Yes to accept the User Account Control settings dialog, and you are all good to go!

 

The post How to Install Mailbird appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Hope you had a beautiful Easter this year with new beginnings, including a whole new way to manage your time with email. Starting today, you are going to increase your email productivity by at least 3x. Well how exactly would I do that, you might ask?

Reading emails takes too damn long.

We already spend tons of time reading, processing and sending emails. What if we could speed those basic email functions up by enabling us the ability to speed read? If you’ve been following the latest educational tech trends, speed reading with tools like Spritz and Spreeder are the latest innovation to how we consume information. Do you read emails fast enough to be successful?

One size does not fit all.

So of course there is a unique difference to how we read depending on what we are reading. For example reading a novel vs. reading an email are very different when looking at how text is visually organized and presented depending on the format. A novel has long paragraphs of on-going text, whereas an email can be both long and short. An email has headers, bullet points or numbering and text formatting. When you read an email you quickly want to get to the point, to the gist of the message context so you can process it efficiently and effectively.

A painfully long email that would take forever to read.

So we challenged our current means of information consumption and email productivity by asking, “How can we help people speed up the processing of emails?” Well of course we were enthusiasts about the latest news on speed reading, and yet we were also skeptics as to whether speed reading as an old concept was riding on a new wave of hype. So we wanted to find out if speed reading techniques improved since the 1970’s research on Rapid Serial Visual Repetition (RSVP).

Excited about bringing a new email reading experience to users, we quickly jumped to testing the current speed readers out there like Spritz and Spreeder. Our response, “Wow! This is awesome. It actually works.” We had to provide this experience for reading emails, with some added logic in how words in an email are visualized, given formatting structures like headers and breaks in emails. Speed reading also works when using Mailbird in other languages with word spacing, so the Mailbird speed reader is not limited to English.

Speed read emails at 500 WPM.

Why speed read emails?

I personally found the Mailbird Speed Reader very relevant for long emails as well as emails that I am either CC’d or BCC’d to. Why speed read? Because we have more important things to do with our time than wasting it reading long emails. Here are typical reading speed averages:

• Third-grade students = 150 words per minute (wpm)

• Eight grade students = 250

• Average college student = 450

• Average “high level exec” = 575

• Average college professor = 675

• Speed readers = 1,500

• World speed reading champion = 4,700

• Average adult: 300 wpm

I realized that I typically read emails at about 500 words per minute. When using the Mailbird Email Speed Reader, I could easily read and quickly process my emails at 800 words per minute. We want to get to the point and clear that email out of our inbox. Of course there may be specific points in an email after speed reading where you need to reply, so the In-Line Reply feature is perfect for this.

Increase your speed by at least 3x using the Mailbird Email Speed Reader. Here’s the speed reader set at 800 WPM.

At least 3x faster with email.

Use Mailbird today, and spend less time with each email that infiltrates your inbox. Mailbird’s Email Speed Reader is just another way we’re helping you and millions around the world, get better at reaching Inbox Zero each day. Try the Mailbird Email Speed Reader now and tell us what WPM (Words Per Minute) you speed read your emails at in the comments below and share this using the social buttons with your friends to see if they can beat your WPM in Mailbird.

How to use the Mailbird Email Speed Reader?

1) Install Mailbird if you are a new user. Restart or Update Mailbird from the Options menu.

2) Select an email.

3) Click the little eye glasses icon at the top right of the message.

4) Set your WPM (words per minute).

5) To exit the speed reader hit Esc or wait for it to finish before returning to normal reading.

Mailbird is the best email alternative on Windows, and now the first and only email client with a special speed reader baked-in.

Still not sure? You can read more about it on TechCrunch here and see it in action in this video called the Mailbird Email Speed Reader.

The post Speed Read to Inbox Zero appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

1. Go To Options

2. Select Account Tab

3. Add Account

4. Insert your account credentials

5. If settings found, choose edit server setting, if not skip this step

6. Change the server type from Imap to Pop3

7. Type your pop3 server settings and press continue to finish

The post POP3 Settings appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

Everyday we are facing the same “battle”. Our “Procrastinator-Me” and “Productivity-Me” are fighting for our attention, then the guilt settles in as we stare at overflowing emails filling up our inbox.

Should I reply to this mail now or after I read about Leonardo DiCaprios new hairstyle?

According to The Radicati Group, Inc. people receive an average of 120 Mails a day! Thats 15 more than in 2011 and the numbers are increasing.

Along with that, the level of stress increases. As Joanne Cantor Ph.D. was quoted by Huffington Post:  “Being overwhelmed by email interferes with your brain’s ability to think and hampers your creativity, as well as increasing stress”.

She also said “The sound of the new email ping from your phone or computer can actually raise your heart rate and blood pressure. But that’s not all, being interrupted by the new email takes our attention away from the task at hand: the work we’re actually doing. It takes time to get focused again after checking your inbox, extending the time it takes to actually get stuff done.”

The term Inbox Zero, introduced by Merlin Mann in 2006, has become somewhat of a Mail-Nirvana to most of us and we only continue to see more and more emails coming through.

How can we shut up our Procrastinator-Me and start cleaning up and reaching Inbox Zero every day?

Credit

Several resources suggest setting yourself a specific time to check email, or creating folders and setting filters etc.

Below are 4 Tips that were found very helpful in boosting Productivity for many users already:

Turn off notifications – favourite and easiest step of all of them! There is no need for you to set yourself a time when to check your mails if you get distracted by the notifications that keep popping up in some corner of your computer.
According to emailoverloadsolutions.com research has found that the average time to recover from an Email interruption is approximately 65 seconds. For someone receiving 100 Emails a day, approximately two hours a day is lost in Email interruption recovery time alone. Do it, switch them off now.

Use In-Line Reply – It already takes a lot of time, thinking of the best way to structure a reply to a mail that requires you to answer more than 3 questions, as you want to keep it as clear and understandable as possible for everyone involved. There is a variety of In-Line Reply Add-Ons and other options to use, but most of them can get pretty messy and very confusing. Mailbird, an email client for Windows, seems to have solved that problem. By just clicking “Enter” in the part of the text you want to comment, the users name appears and the comment can easily be added in the color chosen in the main settings. This simple but yet great feature makes it so much easier for both, sender and recipient.

Limit the length of your Email - Get to the point — but without forgetting your mail Etiquette! You will do yourself and your mails recipient a huge favour if you send out mails that are straight forward, well structured, as short as possible and yet informative. Avoid personal chats in Emails as well as these messages are just unnecessarily filling up your inbox. Always remember your mails recipient is probably trying to reach Inbox-Zero as well and wants to get through your mail as fast as possible.

Use Multiple Accounts:  Using Multiple Accounts can actually be seen as a different way of creating folders. It is very supportive in terms of prioritising your tasks as it allows you to keep a better overview on what the mails are related to and with that the level of priority. Good Email clients like Mailbird for Windows or Sparrow for Mac i.e. are great for working and managing Multiple Accounts.

It simply comes down to what your are most comfortable working with and about finding out what systems or features you find most useful to kick your Procrastinators-Me’s ass.

The post Escape Email Overload appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

One of my favorite features in Mailbird is attachment preview. It lets you take a look at an attached picture or PDF or .doc or whatever without having to download it first.

Great for saving your computer from clutter creep, and choosing whether or not to download that huge attachment.

The post Attachment Preview appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

You know that one email that the world must never see?

Yeah that one.

Here’s how to make sure no one ever does.

The post How to delete an email…permanently appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

While quick reply is a super time saving feature, sometimes you want to write an email with more detailed formatting, with attachments, and with a different identity.

The good news is that it’s easy to do. Here’s how.

The post Opening the Compose Window appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

When you want to insert a picture into an email, but make it a different size than the original, Mailbird has a little button that helps you do that.

The post Re-Sizing Pictures in Mailbird appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

IMAP Support in Mailbird

Mailbird now supports email providers that use IMAP. It is simple, all you need to do is:

1. Download Mailbird Lite from the website first
2. When the Welcome window shows type in your Name you want displayed in emails, your email address from an IMAP account like Yahoo.com, Outlook.com, Aol.com, etc., log in with your password for that account
3. Hit the Connect button
4. Mailbird may already have the email settings pre-filled for the email provider you use. If not you can simply Google Search “server settings for [enter name of IMAP email provider]” to get the server info. For example for Outlook.com as your IMAP email provider you would Google Search “outook.com imap smtp server settings”
5. Fill out the appropriate server setting fields, test the connection until it is approved. You may have to  test the connection with a different encryption  like “SSL” or “TLS”.
6. Voila! Give Mailbird some time for the first initial sync and you can start emailing away in class

Should you have any questions or issues, don’t hesitate to contact us directly at support@getmailbird.com.

The post IMAP Support in Mailbird appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

There are 2 types of account selectors. The first is hidden and the second is always expanded.

The default type of it is hidden.

In the default hidden account selector type, Mailbird will only show your selected account. If you want to access the other accounts, hover over your selected account, and your other accounts will show below your selected account.

The second setting keeps all accounts expanded, you can change this from Options > General, then check/uncheck “Always expand account switcher”

By checking the option to “Always expand account switcher”, you no longer need to hover over the active account to see all other email accounts. All of your accounts will be displayed by default.

The post Accessing Your Accounts appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

1. Go to options

2. Switch to Accounts tab

3. Click add account “+” icon

4. Input your login details

5. If Mailbird knows the IMAP settings for your email account, then Mailbird will display this window. However you are still able to edit your settings by clicking edit. If Mailbird can’t find your settings or if you choose to edit the settings, continue to step 6 otherwise continue to step 7.

6. You can edit your IMAP settings here, you can also choose an icon for each account. Choose an icon that best represents each account the most.

7. Your account has been added successfully!

The post Setting Up Multi Account appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Software for Windows 8, 7 and XP.

One of the really cool things we worked on during the last mega Mailbird hackathon included the super cool Mailbird Swipe Feature. Realizing that a lot of you may not have even been aware of this feature we thought it deserved special notice.

In one of our more recent blog posts called “What’s Happening At Mailbird?” We discuss the discovery that the Mailbird Swipe feature freed up about half the time they normally would spend managing email. Why is that?

Let’s look at the benefits of the Mailbird Email Swipe feature, why you should use it and why it is ultimately awesome:

1. Makes moving emails around by archiving or moving back to the inbox a breeze.
2. It’s fun to use with touch screen machines.
3. It increases your email management productivity.
4. It fast, easy and enjoyable to use while also reducing time you spend archiving.
5. Improves your experience with email through innovative technologies like the touch screen devices that are growing widely popular amongst Windows machines.

So this is actually something that is not yet released. It is a really cool feature to come with the launch of Mailbird 2.0, however you can still use it in the current version of Mailbird by simply clicking and holding on an email message and dragging it from left to right. It’s pretty cool, but wait til you see it in Mailbird 2.0 to be used with touch screen machines. Awesome.

Here’s a sneak peek of the Mailbird 2.0 and the Touch Screen Swipe feature.

Tell us what you think in the comments below and share this post with your friends who could really benefit from the Mailbird Touch Screen Swipe feature. It’s so nice!

The post “Swipe Away” Your Email Troubles appeared first on Mailbird - Best Email Client for Windows 7, 8, 10 & XP.

One of the really cool things we worked on during the last mega Mailbird hackathon included the super cool Mailbird Swipe Feature. Realizing that a lot of you may not have even been aware of this feature we thought it deserved special notice.

In one of our more recent blog posts called “What’s Happening At Mailbird?” We discuss the discovery that the Mailbird Swipe feature freed up about half the time they normally would spend managing email. Why is that?

Let’s look at the benefits of the Mailbird Email Swipe feature, why you should use it and why it is ultimately awesome:

1. Makes moving emails around by archiving or moving back to the inbox a breeze.
2. It’s fun to use with touch screen machines.
3. It increases your email management productivity.
4. It fast, easy and enjoyable to use while also reducing time you spend archiving.
5. Improves your experience with email through innovative technologies like the touch screen devices that are growing widely popular amongst Windows machines.

So this is actually something that is not yet released. It is a really cool feature to come with the launch of Mailbird 2.0, however you can still use it in the current version of Mailbird by simply clicking and holding on an email message and dragging it from left to right. It’s pretty cool, but wait til you see it in Mailbird 2.0 to be used with touch screen machines. Awesome.

Here’s a sneak peek of the Mailbird 2.0 and the Touch Screen Swipe feature.

Tell us what you think in the comments below and share this post with your friends who could really benefit from the Mailbird Touch Screen Swipe feature. It’s so nice!

The post “Swipe Away” Your Email Troubles appeared first on Mailbird.