Can be done. Minimalist Gmail is a Chrome extension that provides option to hide almost all possible elements in Gmail, as well as other extensive customization option.

What can you hide? The top link bar, the Gmail logo, the search box, buttons, sidebar items, advertisements, navigation and just everything else (except for the inbox itself).

For customization, you can change the Gmail logo, highlight starred items with a color of your choice, replace the top links with your own links, use custom attachment icons etc.

If you have a Gmail checker extension installed to monitor new emails, you can uninstall that already. Minimalist Gmail doubles up as a Gmail notifier by indicating the number of unread mails on the favicon. You can also opt for a toast notification whenever a new mail arrives.

A must have for avid Gmail user.

©2011 SheepTech

Minimalist Gmail: Fully Customize Gmail & Remove Clutter in Chrome

WeTransfer is a minimalistic file transfer service with no waiting time, and no annoying ads. There is only one small applet on the website, with an artistic background advertisement.

You can send files up to 2GB to 20 email address. Once your recipient has downloaded the file, you will be notified via email.

No registration is required. You can upload right away, enter your recipient’s email address, your own email address and hit the “Transfer” button.

After uploading, you will receive an email containing a forward link and a download link. Hit the forward link to forward the file to more recipients. Alternatively, you can also share the file using the short URL download link.

All these sounds perfect to bring down those giant file hosting sites with countless of limitations, except the uploaded files will only be hosted for 2 weeks.

©2011 SheepTech

WeTransfer: Beautiful Way to Email Large Files

I’ve personally subscribed to MobileMe’s 2 month free trial, and if I don’t cancel the subscription before the expiry date, Apple will automatically renew my subscription and charge my card accordingly. To depend on just a to do list or my phone’s calender app might be too risky.

At Alertful, you can schedule free email reminders with minimal effort. No account registration, no signing in, just schedule and forget. At the Get Started page, you can select the nature of your reminder, which will determine the email template and mascot used in your email reminder (okay, the mascot is the same, only his action and bubble text is different).

After selecting your reminder category, fill in your reminder title, date, email address, frequency (one off, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), message, and a CAPTCHA.

No email verification is required. Once you hit the “Submit” button, off you go. Meaning you can set up email reminders not only for yourself, but just anyone with an email address (that actually check their inbox).

Here’s an example of the end result, the reminder email itself:

Emails are sent on the date you specified at 9AM UTC. It is rather disappointing that there is no way to specify the exact time and time zone to have the email reminder sent—meaning you can’t count on Alertful for time sensitive reminders.

©2011 SheepTech

Alertful: Create Visually Appealing Email Reminders

With Less Spam, Please, a Firefox add-on, you can generate a temporary email address right within the browser itself. Simply right-click on an email field and click on “Insert a temporary mail address“, a random email address capable of receiving emails will be generated.

Right-click again and select “Open the temporary email mailbox for this site” and you can check your mail. The generated email address for any given website will always remain the same.

After installing the add-on, you are required to first select a mail prefix before anything would work. On the same options panel, you can also select your preferred disposable email provider (YopMail, Humaility, Mailinator or trash-mail.com).

At the time of writing, this add-on is compatible with Firefox 3.6 – 4.0b6.

©2011 SheepTech

Less Spam, Please – Firefox Addon to Generate Temporary Email

OhLife does exactly this. After signing up, OhLife will send you an email every night at 8PM asking “How did your day go?“. Your reply to that email will be your diary entry of the day, automatically stored on OhLife’s website for your reading pleasure in future.

Too busy or just didn’t bother to login to read your entries? Fine. Your diary entry will come and look for you instead. In the same nightly email itself, OhLife will show a random diary entry you wrote in the past.

If for any reason you wanted to stop OhLife from sending you the nightly emails, you can do so from the settings panel. The email delivery time will be fixed at 8PM every night, but you can manipulate this by changing your time zone setting.

You are free to delete or edit any entry you rather not keep. Export is available in .txt format.

©2011 SheepTech

OhLife: Diary That Comes to You

A window overlay sort of a thing will appear, and an excerpt of your mail content will be displayed, like this:

The window is not scrollable. If the full mail content is too long to be fitted, you will have to open the mail to read it in full. That’s the reason they call it sneak peak after all.

On the top left corner of the window, there are 3 buttons—Archive, Delete & Mark as read, for convenience’s sake.

It’s useful to preview recurring emails, say, notifications email when you got a new follower on Twitter, or a blog comment moderation email. You basically know what’s the content by reading the subject alone, previewing it makes it convenient to click a link in the email without opening it.

©2011 SheepTech

Gmail Sneak Peak: Preview Mail Content Without Opening It

When connection is available again, whatever you have done offline just now will be synchronized with Gmail’s servers again. Offline emails will be sent, stars and labels will be updated etc.

Just like other Google services, this new feature will be rolled out slowly. If you don’t see them in your Gmail Labs yet, you should see them in a couple of days, unless you are not using Gmail in English (either US & UK).

If you see Offline Gmail in the Gmail Labs already, you can enable it, and then set it up by clicking on the “Offline^0.1” link at the top right corner.

The Flacky Connection Mode is interesting. It synchronizes your mails with the server in the background, but Gmail will still be using the local cache. It is meant to be used when connection is crappy, but what if we still use it when our connection is decent? Super fast Gmail? I can’t tell until Offline Gmail is available for my account.

Official Gmail Blog – New in Labs: Offline Gmail

Updates:
Offline Gmail is available on my Gmail account after less than 24 hours this post is published. Gmail downloaded one year worth of my mail archive, along with their attachments.

I initially though Flacky Connection Mode can be used to speed things up even if we are on a decent connection. But it turns out that in Flacky Connection Mode, images in emails will not be displayed. If most of your emails are text-based and without any images, Flacky Connection Mode is useful to speed things up, else, only use it when the internet connection is slow or unstable.

©2011 SheepTech

Gmail + Google Gears = Offline Gmail

The good news is you can actually use the FeedBurner powered “Email This” form not only in your feeds, but on your blog as well. In fact, the form can be used on just any websites, even those which are not using FeedBurner.

To implement this on your blog, just simply link to this URL with the appropriate parameter.

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=POST-TITLE&uri=POST-URL

Replace POST-TITLE with the title of your blog post. Replace POST-URL with the URL of your blog post. The link will fetch your visitor to the emailing form.

For WordPress users, just paste the following code to anywhere in your blog template you want the “Email This” link to appear:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<?php the_title(); ?>&uri=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Email This Post</a>

For Blogger/Blogspot users, use this one:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<$BlogItemTitle$>&uri=<$ BlogItemPermalinkURL$>”>Email This Post</a>

It will automatically insert your blog post’s title and URL, so no need to worry of that. This way you can save the hassle of looking for a WordPress plugin and setting it up.

For a demo, just click on the envelope at the end of this post, under Related articles.

©2011 SheepTech

Add “Email This Post” Feature using FeedBurner

the day you believe you’ve reached your fullest potential is the day you have not. (2:31)

Thereby, the Gmail engineers are always looking for ways to improve Gmail, and one way is to test experimental features via the Gmail Labs.

There are 31 experimental features available in Gmail Labs at the time of writing this, ranging from features for boring people like Old Snakey (the old school snake game) to features that will save your from trouble, like Mail Goggles (prevent you from sending emails you might regret later).

There are 5 features that I personally think would be useful to most Gmail users, namely:

1. Custom keyboard shortcuts
Memorizing keyboard shortcuts that you customize on your own is relatively easier than those that have been preset.

Custom keyboard shortcuts allows you to re-map your Gmail keyboard shortcuts, in case you don’t like the default settings.

Lets you customize keyboard shortcut mappings. Adds a new Settings tab from which you can remap keys to various actions

2. Mouse gestures
So you’re not a keyboard person? With mouse gestures, you can make your cheap $5 mouse to work as well as your keyboard! Well, not really, but you will be able to navigate around your inbox more conveniently with your mouse, and most importantly, with style.

Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse left to go to a previous conversation, move it right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the inbox view. Works best on Windows.

3. Navbar drag and drop
The title tells you all. Basically it allows you to re-arrange the boxes/gadgets/(whatever you call it) on the sidebar, deciding which should be on top and which should be at the bottom. What’s better than having things arranged the way you like it?

Allows you to reorder the items in your navbar using drag and drop.

4. Mark as Read Button
This is my favorite. It does nothing more than adding a Mark as Read button, but it saves me hell lots of time. There are times when you already know the content of an email without the need of reading it, or you don’t even want to know what’s in it at all. Instead of having to select “Mark as Read” from the More Actions dropdown menu, it’s now just a button click away!

Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them? Now just enable this lab and that is just a button click away!

5. Add any gadget by URL
This one opens up yet another great possibilities of enhancing Gmail the way you like. With wide range of iGoogle Gadgets, you can do way more in Gmail itself than ever before. Say, tweeting.

Adds a “Gadgets” tab to Settings, where you’ll be able to specify the URL of any gadget. This gadget will show in a box in the left column.

If you have no idea what you’ve just read, login to your Gmail, click on the “Settings” link at the top right corner, then click on the “Labs” tab and start from there. You’ll see a list of Gmail experimental features that you can toy with.

So which among the 31 experimental features is your favorite? Or do you even use any of them?

©2011 SheepTech

5 Gmail Labs Features to Enhance Your Gmail Experience

Disposable email address is one of the best way to prevent your email address being spammed. As its name suggest, a disposable email address is one type of email address that you only use for temporary. You create it within seconds, read the emails sent to the address, and later the email address will be deleted. Below is the list of disposable email address provider that works great:

1. Mailinator (Highly Recommended)

Mailinator requires no registration at all. Just send anything directly to <something>@mailinator.com and you can check the inbox immediately via Mailinator’s website or even RSS. Because of this, you and another user might be sharing the same email address if you both happens to choose the same address. And because of this, the inbox is completely public and just anyone can have access to it.

It is good if you need a quick email address for general purpose, but I would not recommend if you will be using it for handling sensitive information. As mentioned, just anyone can read your email there, provided they know your Mailinator email address.

2.Guerrilla Mail

A random email address will be generated (example: logeuoua@guerrillamail.biz) with just a click at Guerrilla Mail. You will then be redirected automatically to the inbox, which will last for only 15 minutes before the email address will be deleted. However, you can always request for another 15 minutes if you have not done using it yet.

As you can only use Guerrilla Mail for a certain time frame, it is only recommended for one-time-usage. For example, you are forced to join a mailing list before you can download an e-book, you can use Guerrilla Mail.

3. 10 Minute Mail

It works exactly like Guerrilla Mail. Just that 10 Minute Mail (I know it should be 10 minutes, but who cares) is offering just 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes. But again, you can always request for another 10 minutes if you are not done with your stuff.

4. Spaml

There is no need to click anything in order to generate a temporary email address. Once you visit Spaml, a random email address (e.g. j3cjaphxaq@spaml.com) will be generated immediately and being copied to your clipboard.

So basically you only need to visit Spaml, paste the email address to wherever you want it to be submitted, and return to Spaml to check your inbox. You can even customize the email address to your liking (e.g sheeptech@spaml.com).

5. Jetable

Jetable is not a temporary email address provider. But instead, it will generated a random email address that will forward all emails that are sent to that address to your actual email address. Something like a middleman.

You can choose how long the email address will last, one hour, one day, one week, or one month. Once the email address is expired, it will stop forwarding emails to your primary address.

……………

There are still many more temporary or disposable email address provider out there. But most of them basically works the same. It is essential to protect your primary email address as you just couldn’t imagine how terrible spams are—especially when you are with an email provider with an inefficient spam filter.

©2011 SheepTech

Prevent Email Spams By Using Temporary/Disposable Email Address