11 Best Email Productivity Tools

With the amount of time we spend in our email inboxes, it makes sense that we should find ways to enhance our productivity and cut waste. Luckily, there are tools available that can help us boost productivity in email, especially if we are using a tool such as Gmail to manage our emails. 

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What is an email productivity tool? 

A productivity tool is any tool that can automatically boost email productivity without requiring too much effort on the user’s part. Email productivity tools integrate directly with email clients such as Gmail and can function as a plug-in or an extension, or a desktop or web app. 

Considering the number of emails sent per day is 361.6 billion in 2024, you’ll definitely want to teach yourself about email productivity tools. 

Email productivity tools usually give your email extra features such as proofreading drafts, automatically unsubscribing from unwanted emails, or providing handy templates. They provide you with a way to accomplish common tasks in the inbox. 

Although tools such as Gmail can help you achieve many things, email productivity tools boost this functionality with extra features you might not have even known were possible. Since Gmail is the most popular email platform in the world, plenty of tools are available that work with Gmail to improve productivity. 

By achieving greater productivity with your email inbox, you’ll be able to devote more time to tasks that add value to your personal email, business or job. 

Is Gmail a productivity tool?

Gmail itself is the most basic productivity tool for email you can think of. There are plenty of other email tools out there, but Gmail is the best, as attested by its 1.8 billion active users. The great thing about Gmail is you can add productivity features as you feel the need, which is why we have created this post. 

Gmail is built with many native productivity features that you can use before you move on to other tools. For example, you can set up filters and rules to organize your email and use Gmail for task management. Similarly, Gmail will also help you write emails using AI on a basic level, which you can extend using other tools. 

Using Gmail will certainly boost your productivity, but you’ll also want to consider Gmail add-ons, extensions, or apps as well. 

How can I make my email more productive?

You can make email more productive in many ways, starting with automating those processes that take up most of the time in your day. When you’re only using email at a basic level, you can simply use Gmail to accomplish daily tasks. When you need to scale up your operations to use email for customer support or other business communication, native Gmail won’t cut it anymore. 

That’s why many products have been developed that you can integrate with Gmail to help you take email to the next level. You can either make existing Gmail features more powerful or turn Gmail into something else, such as a help desk. Making email more productive means getting more value out of your existing tool with barely any additional cost or effort. 

You can also use extensions or plugins to control how you access your inbox, which can help you manage the number of times that you check your emails. There’s a difference between staying on top of your emails and allowing yourself to become overwhelmed by all the possible email management tasks. 

Give yourself extra features to excel at productivity and remove or limit features to save time. 

What are email management tools?

Email management tools are any tools that help you manage and organize your email inbox. The most basic email management tool is software such as Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, which offer features such as labels or folders, automations, calendars and basic shared inboxes. The downside of these email management tools is they are rather limited when it comes to managing shared email, multiple accounts or enhancing productivity. 

Gmail organization tools allow you to take Gmail to the next level when it comes to email management. Email management encompasses any task to manage email such as reading, responding, organizing, archiving and deleting email, as well as scheduling replies and searching for mail. 

Email management stops email getting out of control because you proactively stay on top of your inbox. In a related field, email management can be a big part of project management because you need to exchange emails with colleagues to accomplish your work. Therefore, better email management helps you complete projects on time by integrating with project management software. 

Collaborate with team members and eliminate bottlenecks with some of the top tools on our list. 

What makes a good email productivity tool? 

The best email productivity tools should work well with Gmail and save you time when managing email. An email tool limits complexity by providing intuitive features that can be applied to common email management tasks, such as composing, scheduling emails, organizing, and archiving incoming emails. 

The tool should work directly on top of Gmail, such as our own Keeping, and avoid interrupting the user experience. In the list we’ll share with you, each productivity tool extends Gmail in some capacity, so you’re getting more from this powerful email management tool. While Gmail can be productive in itself, plenty of extensions and plugins work well with it. 

The tools in this list of best email productivity apps make Gmail more powerful, so you can keep using your favorite platform but benefit from many advanced features that aren’t native to this tool. A good email productivity tool eliminates complexity and workarounds so that your email management system works as it should. 

Everyone’s needs from email are different, but the best productivity tools help you accomplish more. 

The best tools to boost email productivity

Now, we’re going to look at the best tools out there to boost email productivity for Gmail. 

Sending email

A big part of email productivity is the need to send email, which can be made much more efficient with the aid of the following tools. 

Boomerang

In Gmail, it’s possible to schedule an email for later as a native feature but Boomerang is an extension that makes this process much more intuitive. With Boomerang, you can archive an email to keep your inbox tidy and have it surface again exactly when you need it. You can set reminders to follow up if someone doesn’t reply to your email. Boomerang has all the features that you would expect to enable you to use email to its full capacity. 

Right Inbox

Right Inbox is a similar tool to Boomerang which has a free and paid plan, and allows you to significantly upgrade the capacity of Gmail to help you send email. You can write emails at a time that suits you then schedule them to send according to the recipient’s time zone. Automatically schedule follow-ups in case a recipient doesn’t reply which are then canceled if necessary. Toggle between multiple signatures to tailor your responses to each recipient. 

Customer support

The big advantage of an email inbox is you can use it for customer support to manage messages exchanged with customers. 

Keeping

If you want to use Gmail for customer support then your first stop should be Keeping. Keeping is a full-featured help desk tool that helps you assist customers through assigning tickets, collaborating with shared notes, and setting up automations that can route tickets. Businesses love Keeping because you can adopt a help desk for customers without switching to an external tool. 

Customers love Keeping because they don’t even know they’re using it. Installing the Keeping extension means Gmail works exactly the same as before, so customer email messages aren’t cluttered with your typical ticket IDs. Customers can focus on getting support and support teams can focus on adding value to the business. 

Whatever email address you’re using, you can boost productivity behind-the-scenes by using a shared inbox such as Keeping. All you need is a Gmail account to get started. Keeping is the perfect email productivity tool for customer support teams with multiple email accounts. 

Inbox management

Inbox management, or email management, is key to improving productivity. Spend less time wading through emails and more effort performing powerful actions that cut the time spent managing emails. 

Inbox When Ready

Inbox When Ready helps you protect your focus during inbox management by hiding your inbox at specific times and also locking your inbox to prevent you from checking it. This can help you accomplish more deep work by grouping actions together instead of continually spending time in your inbox, ultimately changing your email habits. It also gives you accurate feedback on how much time you are spending in your inbox and enables you to set targets. 

Followup.cc

Turn Gmail into a productivity suite with Followup.cc which provides you with many similar features to manage your email. Set reminders to arrive at the top of your inbox to nudge you when someone hasn’t replied, or schedule follow up reminders to ensure that no one slips through the cracks. Schedule your emails to send at the right time to hit the inbox when recipients are most likely to open them. 

Inbox cleanup

Periodically you’ll want to clean up your inbox to get closer to the ideal of inbox zero. From unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters, to archiving old emails, cleaning up your inbox is necessary to boost productivity so your vision is no longer clouded. 

SaneBox

SaneBox is essential if you want to keep your inbox tidy using its key features that integrate with Gmail or Office365 using the support of AI. The power of SaneBox’s AI is in identifying the most important emails so you can blitz through the clutter, no matter how many emails you receive. Daily updates alert you to the activities of SaneBox so you can understand how it is helping to clean up your inbox. 

Clean Inbox for Gmail

Clean Inbox for Gmail is an app for Gmail that works by allowing you to block incoming spam and marketing emails from hitting your inbox. Filters allow you to create categories that automatically apply to all incoming emails and prevent you from receiving unwanted email. Clean Inbox saves you time by applying preset filters so you don’t have to set them up yourself, powered by ChatGPT using common phrases that nevertheless allow important emails to get through. 

Email templates

Being able to quickly access the email templates you need to write emails will significantly enhance your productivity. 

TextExpander

Use TextExpander to create snippets and templates that you can type into Gmail using a quick search. You can use these keyboard shortcuts to automatically insert frequently used text and dramatically reduce the time you spend typing repetitive emails. The great thing about TextExpander is that it doesn’t just work on your email, but in any system you use to type. Use it as a plugin for the Chrome browser. 

Composing emails

When managing our emails we must spend a significant portion of time actually composing them, which means using our cognitive effort. There are tools available like a writing assistant that can support email composition and reduce the amount of effort it takes to write an email. 

Just Not Sorry

When composing emails we have a tendency to over-apologize, which can undermine our authority and come across as unconfident. If only there were a way to eliminate the excessive apologies that litter our emails – and the good news is, there is. Just Not Sorry is a Chrome extension for Gmail that removes qualifying language to improve the tone of your emails. 

Grammarly

Grammarly is a popular tool that improves the quality and readability of your writing, including emails composed in Gmail. Grammarly uses AI to speed up the process of writing all sorts of text and works automatically inside Gmail to make suggestions for improvement. Not only does Grammarly make your writing more effective but it also provides suggestions for inspiring your audience to take action. Grammarly works on nearly any platform including Google Docs for better writing. 

Ginger

Ginger is an alternative AI-powered solution that helps you improve writing your emails. Ginger has better grammar and punctuation than you could ever hope to have, and also suggests alternative phrases that can help you make your emails more persuasive and readable. Your writing will be more creative and enriched with the help of Ginger. 

Ready to transform how you work in Gmail?

Teams love Keeping because you can collaborate on a shared inbox without ever leaving Gmail. It's not magic, but it is magical.

Find Out More

Wrapping up

Businesses and individuals that take advantage of email productivity tools stand a better chance of staying on top of the chaos and eliminating repetitive tasks. Dealing with email is a necessary evil that keeps us abreast of important updates, and in touch with colleagues and customers who need us. While native Gmail is extremely powerful, taking advantage of plugins, extensions and apps is the route to better productivity. 

While we cannot reduce the amount of email we receive, we can decrease the likelihood that the volume will overwhelm us. Especially when businesses are dealing with a high volume of customer email in an overflowing inbox, finding ways to boost Gmail’s productivity saves untold time and effort that translates back into business value.