Our Zoho Mail team recently added a couple of new features
to the Mail app. Improvements to labels and contextual options for
your folders. Let's take a look.
Labels Specific to Email Accounts
You
may know that Zoho Mail supports multiple email accounts. This means,
apart from your zoho.com email account, you can use Zoho Mail to fetch your emails from external POP accounts. By default, Zoho Mail lets you
maintain a different folder structure for each of your mail accounts
providing you a better way to manage your mail accounts.
Along with Folders, Zoho Mail also supports Labels, for those who
prefer organizing their mail boxes using labels. But previously, Labels
were common across all mail accounts. This is no longer the case. With
the recent update, you can create Labels specific to your mail account.
To create/modify/delete labels for a specific mail account, select the mail account, go to Settings > Personalize > Labels.
Contextual Right Click Options
Do you know that you can right click on mail folders in Zoho Mail? We have a contextual menu offering folder-specific actions. If you
right-click on a folder, you'll typically see options to create sub-folders, Mark Folder as Read, Rename, Delete, Archive etc. Apart from these standard options, you'll also notice an additional contextual option.
When you right click on 'Outbox' for example, you'll see the 'Send Immediately' option to send mails immediately
without holding them in the Outbox temporarily. Similarly,
right-clicking on Draft, Spam or Trash folders offers an 'Empty Folder' option.
Apart from the features mentioned here, we did add a few other features.
We will let you discover these new goodies. If you do, drop us a comment.
Zoho Mail will be undergoing an infrastructure related upgrade this Sunday, Aug 23, 2009 from 8:30 am to 11:30 am, PDT (15:30 to 18:30, UTC/GMT). The service will not be accessible during the said time period. Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you.
The chat bar you see at the bottom of applications like Zoho Mail, Zoho Business, Zoho Docs does a lot of useful things. Most of them has got to do with your presence status and the bar helps you in chatting live with your contacts who are online. But there's one other important feature - notifications. The little bell icon adds a number to itself whenever there is a new notification.
You get notified for a good many work instances.
1. When you are offline and someone sends you a chat message
2. When someone shares a Zoho document, spreadsheet or presentation.
3. When you upload a file to Zoho Docs
4. When you make a post in a Zoho Discussions forum and someone responds to it. You get notified when you watch someone or a forum too.
5. Users can send a direct notification message (instead of a chat message) to their Contacts / Groups from Zoho Chat
You can see the past notifications history by clicking on the Feeds link. 
So, watch the little Notification icon at the bottom-left when you login to Zoho the next time. It might have some important notifications for you :) The chat/presence bar itself will continue to evolve as we have planned for more useful features to be delivered through it.
Zoho, the upstart provider of online Web applications, seems to be continually integrating and upgrading its products in the cloud, says China Martens, an analyst with The 451 Group. Martens jokes that it's as if all of the Zoho developers sit in separate rooms for several months, each one pounding away at his respective application (Zoho Mail, for example, or Zoho CRM), only to have the walls come tumbling down just as the developers are ready to join their applications.
Unveiled at the start of July, the 2.0 release of Zoho Projects, the collaboration and productivity platform, reflects multiple integration efforts, as well as the following improvements:
- Twitter-like status bars enable project members to be more social within the application.
- Project-member activities are presented in a project stream, which is a visual representation of project activities.
- The integration of Zoho Chat and the enablement of group chat, through which project members can add tasks, assign them out, and even attach documents to them. Members can also move beyond Chat to create a discussion forum.
- An expansion of the user interface to allow project members to bring in external information, write notes on documents, and assign documents to a particular task.
- The ability to create a wiki for centralizing information, eliminating the need to import an outside Zoho Doc.
- The addition of a timesheet, integrated with Zoho Invoice, to log and track time spent on specific tasks, and to easily create, send, and track invoices.
Zoho also made some significant enhancements to its Zoho CRM product recently. With the Zoho CRM Mail Add-on, officially announced on July 21, Zoho CRM now integrates with email -- and not just Zoho Mail. The selection of any email account for integration will add an "email" tab to the Zoho CRM application. Users running off a non-Zoho email client can configure Zoho Mail to be the interface for sending and receiving. According to the company, the most significant element of the integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Mail is that the contact information involved in each email is automatically added to the Zoho CRM system, where a user can see all of the correspondence with a particular contact. Users can respond to email from within the CRM system, or even add tasks to a given contact.
Our Zoho Mail team has been continuously pushing updates to the app. In the latest round of updates, we added several goodies which you might find useful.
Email archiving in Zoho Mail
How often do you go back to look up some old email? I assume, not so often. When the active part of your inbox is small, there are some innovative things that can be done. So keeping this in mind, we have enabled auto archiving for your emails. This archiving feature kicks in when you have more than 75,000 emails in your mail account. When you cross this count, you'll notice a new 'Archive Folders' section below your email folder tree where all the archived mails are displayed. The archive folder structure is similar to your regular folder structure, except that older emails are moved to archive folders.
Emails older than 3 months are automatically archived under the 'Archive Folders' section. We don't archive emails that are flagged. If you don't want some of your emails to be archived, we also added an 'Unarchive' option to move emails back to your active folders.
When you search in Zoho Mail, the results are displayed from your active mail folders by default. You can however include the contents of archive folders in your search results by enabling this under search options.
Apart from keeping your inbox light and clean, there are several advantages to this auto-archival feature. Search is much faster, for example, so is sorting based on sender (when you click on the sender name). This also makes IMAP sync (coming soon) easier especially with traditional mail clients like Outlook where storage space is limited.
Email Templates
If you send canned messages to multiple people, this new feature can be very useful. When you compose an email, you'll notice the new 'Save Template' option. The contents of your email draft will be saved as a template under the (new) Template folder.
To compose an email from an existing template, click on the mail from the template folder, and the compose window launches in an application tab.
Additional Options
Last week, when we launched Zoho Mail integration with Zoho CRM, we added a new option in Zoho Mail to add a contact directly from Zoho Mail to Zoho CRM with a single click. This 'Add to CRM' feature is available under 'More Options' when you view an email. This adds sender information as a contact in Zoho CRM if it doesn't exist already. You also have option to create a task for that contact in Zoho CRM right within Zoho Mail.
Under 'More Options', you'll also notice a new 'Add Filter' option that conveniently lets you easily create a filter based on the info from the selected email.
There are many other tweaks in the system, but these are some of the key changes in our recent update. As always, we look forward to your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the app further.
In
one of my previous posts, I talked about integration between different Zoho Apps expanding on the following integrations.
Over the past year or two we have had some initiatives on mobile capabilities for selected Zoho applications. With Zoho Mobile, we are aggregating all our previous initiatives with consistent user interface and extending it to multiple applications and mobile
platforms.
Zoho Gadgets launches today with the aim to connect Zoho applications with external applications. Zoho Gadgets, available at http://gadgets.zoho.com, can be integrated/embedded with online applications like iGoogle, Facebook, Orkut, Gmail & more. To start with, we are offering six Zoho gadgets.
We have many users using Gmail for email and Zoho for Documents. If
you are one of those users, you can now view your Zoho Documents within
Gmail. To do this, you'll have to enable the Labs feature in Gmail. To do this, go to Settings > Labs Tab > Enable 'Add any gadget by URL' and save the changes. 
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