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Streak: There's an App for That

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We're pleased to announce the our that our first mobile app is available -  Streak for iPhone.



Streak for iPhone is just like Streak for Chrome, optimized for the small screen.



Gmail, baked right in

Just like Streak for Chrome and Safari, the iPhone app is a tight integration between Gmail and the Streak CRM.  Access your Gmail from inside the Streak app.  Send and receive emails, add tags, add attachments - all without leaving the Streak.



Make updates on the go


Just walked out of a meeting and want to enter some notes on a client? Want to assign a task to a teammate? You can now update Streak boxes on the go.



Send repetitive emails quickly

If you use Streak snippets on the desktop, you know that they can save you tons of time, and keep you confident that you're sending tried and tested text.  On the phone, they're even more important - typing is slower, and copy-and-paste is more laborious.  So we're happy to bring your snippets to the iPhone.



Keep up to date with your team's activity

In Streak, you can view all the changes to your boxes and pipelines by viewing the newsfeed.  On the iPhone, we bring you newsfeeds for boxes and pipelines, plus a new global newsfeed that covers all of your pipelines.


More coming soon

We wanted to get Streak for iPhone in your hands as quickly as possible, but we're not done with it yet.  In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing:
  • Account switching
  • Pipeline sharing
  • Creating pipelines, new boxes, and reminders
  • Saved views
  • Send later functionality
If there's anything else you want from the app, or have any suggestions on it, please email us as support@streak.com, or chat with us from right within the app.

New Boxes Button

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Making boxes is one of the most common tasks you do while using Streak so we wanted to refine that flow to take a fraction of the time. Enter the new Boxes Button:


When you have an email selected in your inbox, or you're looking at an email conversation and activate the Boxes Button you'll see something similar to this.


The first difference you'll notice is that there's no "Create new box" button... we'll get to that later. Instead  we show you two sections:

  1. existing boxes that you have in the system that may be related to this email, and 
  2. a section for suggested names if you want to make a new box.


If you start typing then we search the existing boxes and also give you an option to add a new box with the name that you're typing.


Selecting an existing box behaves as you expect by associating the selected email thread to the chosen box. If you create a new box, then you still have to choose the pipeline the box goes into:


You select your pipeline and you're done.

No more dialog pop-ups, and hopefully fewer duplicate box names as you should be seeing any existing boxes that may be relevant to the email you're looking at. This flow is substantially faster and more efficient. And the best part is no functionality was sacrificed for efficiency, in fact the Boxes Button is even more useful now.

When you combine the new flow with the new keyboard shortcuts that I'll illustrate in the next blog post you'll be flying through you inbox in no time.

A Gift to Power Users: Keyboard Shortcuts

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If you are a heavy user of Gmail and don't use keyboard shortcuts, just stop reading this right now and go read this article then go and enjoy the extra hour in your day you have - everyday.

With the latest release of the Streak we've enabled keyboard shortcuts for nearly all of the major tasks in Streak, and we've even incorporated the keys into Gmail's keyboard help system (just press ? in Gmail).

Search boxes and pipelines - press "w" then "p" or "w" then "b" and you can now search for pipelines and boxes respectively, right in the search bar. This is very similar to pressing "g then l" which is Gmail's shortcut for searching for labels. This w->p/b shortcut is extremely powerful for navigating around Streak and getting to pipelines and boxes extremely quickly.




Keyboard enabled Boxes Button - with an email selected in inbox view or when looking at an email conversation pressing "w" then "a" will activate the Boxes Button. From here you can use the arrow keys to select an existing box, or create a new box with one of the suggested names. Or you can start typing to search existing boxes or create your own name for the new box. When you have your choice selected simply press enter and if you're making a new box then you can use the cursors and press enter to select the pipeline.

Keyboard enabled Box Sidebar/Box View - when you're reading an email that has box information on the right, or you're looking at the box details view you can change the stage and edit the information in the fields without touching the mouse. Press "w" then "tab" to focus on the box information and edit the stage/title and then tab your way to the next field.


When you combine keyboard shortcuts with the new boxes button you'll find yourself absolutely flying through emails and managing your inbox will become 10x easier.

As always check it out and let us know what you think!

Making it easier to switch to Streak - introducing Import

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With the latest release of Streak we've added the ability to import CSV files into a pipeline. This feature lets you migrate from your existing CRM/spreadsheet into Streak.

You can access the import option from the "More" button in the pipeline view

Select "Import from CSV" and this will bring up a modal wizard.

The first step is to upload your file:


You can choose a file on your computer by using the "Choose File"button or you can drag and drop into the dashed rectangle area.


Once the file has been uploaded Streak does some analysis to ensure the file is valid, and we'll notify you of any issues.

You'll get a summary of the file - which matched columns were found and how many boxes were in the file before you commit and add the boxes to the pipeline.

So that's it.

It's simple, powerful, and just works. Try it out and let us know what you think.

P.S. this is also a way to backup and restore your pipelines. Just note that it only backs up your boxes but not the emails/comments/etc inside of them. We'll have a better solution for this soon. 

New Style for Box Indicators

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Since Streak was first launched, we've been showing users little indicators in their inbox to indicate that an email is inside a box. But they were easy to miss and didn't give you enough information sometimes.

Today we launched a small but useful change to them. The indicators now look like labels applied to your email. Theirs a little icon inside to tell you that its different from a label but also the label text is the name of the pipeline that the email/box is in.

Take a look:





You can also, change the color easily by hovering over the pipeline in the left side bar and choosing the drop down to pick a different color.



News Feed Filtering

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Today we added filtering to the news feed inside of your Pipeline. Now you can adjust your news feed to your liking. To start, open the dropdown menu beside the show/hide button for the news feed.



From here you can decide whose updates you want to see, and what updates you want to see. Updates from me and everyone else do what you would expect. They filter the news feed to only show updates from the people selected.

Updates with high importance is the default setting and includes things like creating a box, changing the stage of a box, and adding a comment to a box. If you need to see more details you can choose the all setting which shows all of the actions taken on a pipeline.

Using Streak to Find an Apartment

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Hi, I'm Jon and I am going to show you how I am using Streak to help find a new apartment. We all know finding an apartment is a major pain, so I am going to walk you through how I set everything up with Streak to make the process as simple as possible.

First I needed a pipeline to track any potential apartments. There isn't a predefined pipeline that matches my needs, so I used the Blank pipeline.


This created a pretty basic pipeline for me. From here I renamed the pipeline to Apartments, added a description, created a few new stages, and added a few new columns for a viewing date, viewing time, and a link to the posting.


Next I needed to create some boxes and find an apartment. Once I found an apartment I was interested in I started writing an email to setup a time to view the apartment. After writing the email I realized I didn't want to write the same email every time, so I setup a snippet to help simplify the process. You can find the snippets button right beside the "Check Spelling" button while composing an email.


I created my snipped, named it Apartment, and set it to insert when I type "apartment_snippet".


Now all I need to do is type "apartment_snippet" and Streak replaces it with my precomposed email. This is really useful when you are constantly copy-pasting urls and or when you are writing the same email several times a week.

Next I want to add my emails to a box so I can easily track them. Streak has a Boxes button built into the UI so I can quickly create a new box for my email.




After sending out a few emails I quickly found that I wanted to track these boxes in my inbox view. Streak has support to display a list of boxes in the inbox. Just go to the pipeline, click the "More" button, and select "Show current view in Inbox."



This allowed me to see my boxes from the Apartments pipeline directly in my inbox, and after Streak released the new box indicators I was able to instantly see when new emails were about apartments I was interested in.


Everything was looking good, but I am a forgetful person. I had a pipeline full of boxes and some had times scheduled to view the apartment, and I really didn't want to forget and miss out on a great apartment. This is where Streak's reminders were a lifesaver. Inside of each box is a reminders section on the right sidebar. From here you can click the "New Reminder" button and add a reminder for any day and time. Streak will send you an email at the specified time to remind you of an action you need to complete.


And that sums up how I am using Streak to find a new apartment. We would love to hear how you are using Streak to make annoying tasks like finding an apartment easier, so let us know in the comments!

If you have any questions about how I set anything up please let me know with a comment or send us an email at support@streak.com and we will try our best to help you out.

Unlimited Email Tracking For Gmail with Streak

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Today we're launching one of the most heavily requested features by our users - email tracking. This feature lets you know when one of your emails is being read by a recipient. Users have been asking for this feature for quite some time and we've consistently recommended other products and services..... until we started using them. We wanted to build not only a better experience than other services out there but more importantly, something that integrates tightly with Streak and the rest of Gmail.

With email tracking, you'll be able to know exactly when a critical sales lead or customer has read your email so you can take appropriate follow up actions.

We spent a lot of time designing a great email tracking experience and it starts with a seriously generous quota. We're offering 200 free tracked emails a month with an easy, and free way to get unlimited tracked emails (more on that below).

How to Use Streak Email Tracking

Toggle Tracking On

The first thing to do to get started with email tracking is to toggle the feature on while composing an email using the "eye" icon shown below:



You can default email tracking to on or off in the Streak Settings tab in Gmail's settings interface.

Receiving Read Notifications



You'll get read notifications when your email is read automatically. You can change the default setting of desktop notifications to chat or email notifications in the Streak Settings interface.

Getting Detailed Read Stats for an Email



Simply open any tracked email and the right sidebar of Gmail will show a timeline of reads of each individual message. You'll find the reader's name, device and location. For even more details and stats, the "Show Details" link can provide more information displayed graphically



Finding Tracked Emails

There are several ways to find tracked emails you've sent in the past. Indicators appear next to any emails that are tracked throughout Gmail (inbox, labels, etc.). 



There is also a special link under Sent Mail called Tracked Threads that will only show you emails that are tracked. 

Finally, you can search for tracked emails by adding the "has:tracking" to any search query. This will limit your searches to just to emails that have tracking enabled. 



Unlocking Unlimited Email Tracking

By default, you can send 200 tracked emails a month but its really easy to unlock unlimited email tracking by sharing Streak Email Tracking with friends or coworkers. You'll be given the option to share when you first start with email tracking or when you hit the 200 email limit in a month.






Linked Boxes

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Many Streak users have multiple pipelines to help manage their customers. For example, you may have a Sales pipeline to help manage selling your product to prospective customers. However, once they become clients, you may manage after sales support using a Support pipeline. The boxes you have in your support pipeline are individual support issues that come up, however, you may want to see the relevant Sales information about the company (deal size, number of clients, etc) when you are dealing with support issues.

To help with this, today we're launching our Linked Boxes feature. Linked Boxes let you tie together two boxes so that you can easily navigate between them. These boxes can be in the same or different pipelines.

So for our example above, every support box from a certain customer, can be tied to their corresponding box in the sales pipeline. Here's how the feature works:


To get started goto a box that you want to link, then click on the "Add Linked Box" button. This will let you search for any other box that you want to link to.



When you've linked a box, you'll be able to easily navigate to it from the box view, the right sidebar of an email or the pipeline view.



You can even insert a column in your pipeline view that shows all the linked boxes (or a subset of them):



Linked Boxes is our first paid feature for Streak and will only be available in these paid plans. We're starting to offer this paid plan to customers now and we hope to have full details coming soon. If you'd like to inquire about our paid plans, email us sales@streak.com.

Email Box Filters

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Some Streak users have a one-box, one-user system. For example, they may track sales leads, or have a support box for each customer account.

Until recently, if an email came in from a user, you'd have to notice the email, remember whether you already had a box for that user, and then add the email to the correct box.

We're releasing a new feature called Email Filters to make this automatic.

If you want all emails with bob@gmail.com to get added to the Bob Smith box, you can set up an Email Filter on the box for bob@gmail.com. From then on, all new emails with bob@gmail.com will automatically get added to the Bob Smith box, no extra work needed.

How to Use Email Filters

To get started, add an email thread to a box. Streak will automatically suggest some filters you may want to add.


You can see your filters for a box at any time.





If you want to make an Email Filter that Streak doesn't suggest, the "New Filter" button is your next stop. You can add all emails with a particular user to a box, or you can also choose to box all emails with users on one domain if you want to group a company together.

Unlimited Email Filters

By default, you will be able to create up to 10 Email Filters. Unlimited Email Filters are available in our paid plans. We're starting to offer this paid plan to customers now and we hope to have full details coming soon. If you'd like to inquire about our paid plans, email us at sales@streak.com.

Deep Linking

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Have you ever tried to collaborate with others in Streak, and tried to share a box with the other person? Up until recently, it was a frustrating experience, and there was no easy way to get someone on the same page. Now you can share links with anyone shared on your pipeline, and it will work exactly how you expect.


When you're on a box (or any other page), just copy the link from the URL and send it to them.

If they
  • have Streak installed 
  • and they're shared on what you're linking
then they'll be taken to the page you link them to.

Recently Viewed Emails

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Last November we launched Email Tracking in Gmail and it's been a great success.

One of the missing pieces of our solution was the ability to see which of your emails have been recently read by the recipients. This is useful when you've sent out a few dozen emails and you want to follow up with people as soon as they've read the email.

We're proud to say that we've now launched a "Recently Viewed" link inside of Gmail.



This link shows up underneath your "Sent Mail" folder, and if you don't want to see it you can just click the triangle to toggle it off.

Clicking on that link will do exactly what you think. It'll take you to a list of your emails ordered by the date that they've most recently been read.


We annotate this list with the actual view date and order the emails based on when they were viewed (newest up top) instead of when you sent out the email. 

The best part about this list, is that it's just a regular list of emails inside of Gmail. This means you can star, label, read the thread, add it to a box, etc. Just like any list of emails. 

It just works.

Getting this list to work right has been a lot of work, but after seeing the results we think it was definitely worth it. We're confident you'll agree. Check it out and let us know what you think!


Deprecating Gmail Chat Notifications

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When we first launched our notification system, we decided that we wanted people to get notifications in their inbox just like they get chat notifications. As such we decided to just use Google Chat as the default way to notify you about stuff happening in Streak.

However, Google has recently deprecated Google Chat in favor of Google Hangouts and we'll no longer be able to send you chat notifications. However, we already have several other options that may suit you even better, specifically browser notifications and email notifications.

As of April 1st, we'll no longer support chat notifications. You can change your notification settings by going to Streak settings (search our help for more info).

If you have any requests for new notification types (like SMS), let us know at support@streak.com.

Using Streak for a Career Search

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Where are you in your job search? Have you discovered the stress of balancing multiple priorities, the hassle of managing your contacts, and the difficulty of organizing the process effectively?

Streak’s Career Search pipeline can enhance your productivity: track your contacts, emails, notes and deadlines efficiently in one place. Manage your time better. Focus on what matters to land your dream job.

Let me show you how it can assist you in four simple steps!

Step 1: Install the Streak extension by visiting www.streak.com


Step 2: Create a new career search pipeline



Click “new +” to create a new pipeline.



Scroll down and click “Career Search”.


Now you’ll have a career search pipeline with a tracker telling you visually which stage you are in the process for each company. There are six stages:

1) My Network
2) Chat Scheduled
3) Researching Company
4) Submitted Application
5) Interview Scheduled
6) Received Offer

1) and 2) are for tracking contacts and 3)-6) are for tracking companies.


You’ll also have the following pre-made columns for your individual contacts and/or companies: Name, Company, Position, Referral Method, Email Addresses, Notes, Personal Information, Stage, Date Last Updated, and Date of Next Reminder.

You can easily delete or add custom columns by clicking the upside down triangle in any column. You can also re-arrange the order of the columns by dragging an individual column to its new placement.


Step 3:  Input your contacts


If you have an excel file, you can import your contacts by hitting “More” at the top of the screen and clicking “Import CSV File.” Just make sure your excel file has the same headings as your columns and is saved as a CSV File.




If you are starting from scratch, it’s really simple to add contacts. Here’s how you add the first contact. Click the arrow on the left side of the first stage, “Contacts/Networking” to highlight that stage. Then click “+ New Box.” A new row will appear under the bolded stage.



In the new row, type in information about the contact’s name, company, position, and so forth.



Then, click on the Streak box icon on the left of the contact, and you’ll come to a more detailed page for your contact. To a contact, you can 1) Add files, 2) Set-up email filters, and 3) Add reminders that will be emailed to you.



Here’s an example of me setting-up an email filter so that in the future, all emails from Oliver, are automatically stored with this contact



You can also add emails from your inbox directly by clicking on the Streak icon and choosing the contact box to filter to, shown below.



The best way to track your contacts is to use the “Stage” column. If you’ve scheduled a meeting with them, change the stage to “Chat scheduled,” else, keep them in the “My Network” stage.


Step 4: Input companies you’re interested in.

Here’s a series of screenshots showing me inputting the company Goldman Sachs and all relevant information. In the “Name” column, I’ve put the industry followed by my ranking for the position in that industry.




With these steps, you’re all set to start your career search using Streak!!

If you’d like to become a power user, read on. Here are four recommended tips that will save you time.

Power Tip 1: The color-coded tracker is a great visual to see how many contacts and companies you’re talking to, and where you are in the process.



It’s important to update your “Stage” column so your tracker is up-to-date. Go to the “Stage” column for the contact or company, and choose the correct stage from a drop-down menu.

Power Tip 2: When sending emails, you can delay send, sort to your contact or company, create or use an email template with Snippet, and/or track if your email has been read.


Power Tip 3: To see all your contacts at one company, sort the company column.





A note about the author:

Stephanie is an MBA student at Harvard Business School.  She and her classmates have been using Streak’s Career Search pipeline to track their networks and organize their job searches.  If you want to start a conversation tweet @LandDreamJob.

Customizable Streak Indicators

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Right now when an email is part of a box we indicate that association to you in the inbox using our label-like indicator. This makes it super quick and easy to see which emails have been associated with a Streak box, and also which pipeline that box is in. However, some people only have one pipeline (shocking, I know) so they'd prefer to see what stage that particular box is in, while others have requested seeing the name of the box itself.

Today we've launched a new feature that should satisfy everybody - we've added to ability for you to customize which Streak labels show up. You can independently choose to show the Pipeline name, Stage name, and Box name. So you can have all 3 showing up on each row, or just one of them, or even none.


For users with wider monitors, showing all 3 labels might be right but for others showing the most important label might be best.

To change this setting, simply go to the Streak Settings area accessible in Gmail's settings area - click on the Gmail gear in the top right. Here you'll see the option to select which labels get added.


Try it out and let us know what you think.

Summarize your pipeline!

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Streak has been very good at letting you keep track of attributes of your boxes, like the deal size of a box in your sales pipeline. But what if you wanted to know what the deal value of all the boxes in your pipeline is? Or all the boxes in a particular stage? Until now that hasn't been possible.

Today we've launched the ability to summarize columns in your pipeline. Any column can be summarized with a variety of functions like Average, Sum, Maximum, etc. You can see the summary for the entire column or just a particular stage.

This is really useful for calculating the value of all the deals in a pipeline but there are may other cases where this comes in handy. Comment below with the different ways you are using Summaries.

To create a summary for the entire pipeline, click on the the drop down at the top right of the pipeline and choose the column you want to summarize and the function you want to use to summarize it.






To create summaries for each stage, simply hover over any of the stage headers and summarize links will show up. Pick the column and the function you'd like to summarize.







Pipeline Summaries are a paid feature and available in the corporate plan and above.  To make this feature even more useful, we're working on letting you add custom formulas to your columns (just like Excel), stay tuned....

Group Boxes By Date Ranges

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When conducting analysis on your pipeline to see how it's been doing, it's useful to be able to group the data by date. For instance, in sales you want to group your boxes by expected close date either by month or quarter to make sure your pipeline is healthy, or if you're using Streak for bug tracking you may want to see how many bugs you're fixing each week.

Previously, this wasn't really easy to do in Streak, but with the latest version we've just released we've made it extremely simple.

We've now added the option to group Date columns by Day, Week, Month, Quarter and Year.


This lets you see your boxes grouped accordingly, and when you combine these groupings with Column Summaries you can even see some nice ad-hoc reports where you can see total deal size projected for each month/quarter, or historical deal totals.


Grouping by these date ranges is also incorporated into our Saved Views system so you can create some saved views to access these perspectives with one click.




It's a relatively simple feature, but already it's amazing the kind of insights that it's bringing forth. Try it out and let us know what you think.

New Box View

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As Streak matures and the users of Streak grow their businesses the demands of the Streak interface need to evolve. The Box view now needs to handle many people interacting with the same box and inputting hundreds of files, emails, reminders, etc. And so we redesigned the Box view from the ground up.


The first two things you'll notice is the newsfeed is much more prominent on the righthand side of the page and we've consolidated all the different types of information you can associate with the box (files, emails, tasks, reminders, filters, etc) into one "Contents" section. There are a few other key improvements that we'll detail in the rest of this post.

Newsfeed
The newsfeed is no longer hidden below the rest of the page where you might miss an important development if you didn't scroll down! It now also groups entries by time ranges, so it's easier to get a feel of when things happened.

Contents
The improvement to moving towards a single Contents section are numerous. The ways you can interact with the individual items is immediately visible, you can easily remove emails from a box, edit reminders, or other content-specific actions.

The various "add new item" buttons have been merged into the one bright "Add to box" button. We no longer have to invent a new UI widget for each item type we want to show in the box in the future. So anytime you want to add a new item to the box it's obvious where to go.


Now that we have this capability, look for a steady increase in the types of things you can add to boxes. Meeting Notes, Call Logs, Calendar Notes and more are all coming soon! 

Have a ton of items in the box and need to narrow down your view? We've got you covered with the view filter and sorting options.


People Section
The "People" section now shows more details at-a-glance about all of the participants in the emails added to the box. There's the "Email All" button if you need to get the attention of the relevant people. The "Related Emails" buttons will quickly show you all your emails involving the person.



We've also fixed some old issues. Emails can be removed from the box page now. Boxes can now be deleted or moved to another pipeline from within the box page. You no longer have to find the box in the pipeline page to do it.


We rolled out this update a couple of days ago and the response has been great. Please keep giving us your feedback, and look forward to all of our future additions over the coming months.

Introducing Email Snooze

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Focusing on your work is one of the keys to being more productive. At Streak we're always looking for ways to remove distractions so you can focus on what matters: closing deals, and getting real work done.

Today we're launching our Snooze feature that lets you archive an email now, and have it come back to the top of your inbox later. This lets you remove lower priority emails out of your inbox so you can deal with them later.

Whenever you're looking at a conversation, or have one or more emails checked, you'll see the "Snooze" button available.

Clicking on the button will bring up the menu where you can specify how long you want to snooze the email for. You can even add an extra condition that if there's a reply on the thread, that cancels the snooze. Once you snooze an email its archived immediately (but also available in the snoozed list - see below).

The second way that Snooze makes you more productive is bringing an email that you've sent out to the top of your inbox if there hasn't been a response. This is a very common use case for salespeople as they send out their sales emails and want to follow up when there's been no activity to make sure the deal doesn't fall through the cracks. Now, instead of having to remember which leads to follow up with, just schedule the Snooze and forget about it.



If you want to see all of your Snoozed emails, we provide that capability from directly within Gmail. Simply click on the "Snoozed" link on the left, and you'll see all the emails you have snoozed.


You can also just do a search inside of Gmail, and any threads that have an active Snooze on them will have a special indicator. 


Last, but definitely not least, is the "Awaiting Reply" view. Without taking any extra action you can now see which emails you've sent out that have not received a reply yet. These don't have to be just Snoozed emails, this will work with any message you've sent but haven't received a reply for.



Now, there are some other services that provide similar functionality to Snooze, however, we're firm believers that we offer the best solution. You can schedule and manage everything right from within Gmail. Better yet, when the time comes for the email to come back to the top of your inbox we don't generate a reply, the thread just comes to the top unmodified, exactly as you'd expect.

Oh, and Snooze is 100% free to use.

Introducing Thread Splitting for Gmail

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We think Gmail's email threading is one of their best features, but automatic threading doesn't always work the way you'd like it to. For example, halfway through a support email for an existing customer, the topic may change as you may bring in a sales rep. Great news! But glance at the email thread: it's hard to see what it's about immediately, or find emails you're looking for.

We're launching a new feature today called Thread Splitting.


While looking at a thread, click the "More" menu in the top-right, and select "Split Thread".


A menu comes up where you can select the new sales messages, to be split out into another thread.

Click "Move Message to New Thread" and the sales emails are split into their own thread, with a subject you select.


You can also split out just a single message.


Thread Splitter is 100% free to use! We're sure you'll find tons of uses for this so let us know how you're using Thread Splitting in the comments below.
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