How to become a Gmail power-user

— -- In Silicon Valley, there's one email service of choice: Gmail. Perhaps it's because of Gchat's addictive nature, the integration with other Google services or the company's overwhelming presence in the Valley, but techies love their Gmail. We take a look at some useful hacks to make you a Gmail pro.

Unroll.me

Inundated with never-ending messages from alumni listservs, Groupon deals and spam you never even signed up for in the first place? We hear you.

If you're willing to shed some email baggage, Unroll.me is ready to help. The service helps manage inboxes by unsubscribing users from email lists. It uses OAuth support (OAuth is an open standard for authorization) to crawl through Gmail, Yahoo and Aol accounts (Public Service Announcement: It's no longer 1995; it's time to upgrade from Aol Mail) to find emails you're subscribed to, allowing you to opt out in bulk.

One of its slickest features is the rollup, a digest overview of your subscriptions, sent to your inbox once a day. You choose which email lists go into the rollup, which links back to the original messages.

Gmail Meter

Back in March, Stephen Wolfram (you know, of computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha fame) wrote a piece for Wired that gave outsiders a glimpse into the personal analytics he keeps on his life with gorgeous charts — everything from his 100 million keystrokes distributed over time of day to analysis of his hundreds of thousands of emails dating back to 1989.

Though not as comprehensive, Gmail Meter makes it easy for non-data scientists to analyze email habits too. Gmail Meter, a user-submitted Google Apps script, is a tool that sends a monthly report on inbox statistics, including email volume, daily traffic, traffic patterns, email categories, time elapsed before sending a response, word count and thread lengths. Intrigued? Setup is only a couple steps long and is detailed on the official Gmail blog.

Rapportive

Rapportive is a nifty browser extension that gives your inbox context. Who's this John Smith emailing you? With Rapportive, the right pane of Gmail, normally reserved for ads, shows a profile of the person you're communicating with. There, you can see John's company, location, latest tweets, Facebook updates, past emails to you, LinkedIn profile, among other details. If you give Rapportive access to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, you can connect with John on these platforms without having to leave Gmail.

This provides a highly informative look at your contacts. There's even a feature to leave notes for yourself ("met John at a tech networking event") to help you manage relationships. Rapportive is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and other browsers.

Clearing up space

One potential drawback to Gmail is that there's a finite amount of storage (compared with Yahoo, which has no cap, even for free accounts). For most people, this isn't a problem since the email service now doles out 10GB of space for basic accounts. But for some power users, they either have to shell out $5 per year for 20 gigabytes (chump change, really) or delete, delete, delete until there's some breathing room.