This week MacSparky is sponsored by MailButler, your personal assistant for Apple Mail. One of the best features of Apple Mail is the plugin architecture, letting you customize the application to suit your needs and the grand-daddy of Apple Mail plugins is this week’s sponsor, MailButler.

With MailButler at your back, you’ll make fewer common email mistakes. Do you ever forget to respond or act upon an email? MailButler lets you create to-do items right from the email message to avoid that.

Do you ever set an email aside and then later forget to get back to it? MailButler has a Snooze feature that puts deferred email right back in your inbox.

Have you ever written an email with the intention of sending it later? MailButler has a scheduling tool that can send that email later for you automatically.

There are so many more ways MailButler helps you avoid mistakes with the “Undo Send” button, attachment reminders, and more.

See how powerful you can make Apple Mail today with MailButler.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can start saving your bacon today. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

• Wake up everyday to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 
• Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
• Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
• Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
• Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
• Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot more serious about email reminders with SaneBox. When I send an email to a client or a business associate that requires a reply, I blind copy the email to 1week@sanebox.com or 2days@sanebox.com or april17@sanebox.com. Then I forget about it.

SaneBox keeps track of whether or not I get reply to that email and, if I haven’t received a reply in the designated time, it gives me a reminder. This allows me to dodge the whole process of putting tasks into my system to track email replies. I’ve been using this a lot more lately and I’m saving time as a result. As seen above, this is just one of the many features available to SaneBox subscribers.

The list goes on. Why not straighten out your email in 2017 by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, the CRM & Project Management app for teams on Mac, iPhone & iPad. New in Daylite is Team View for Mac. 

Team View gives business owners and managers a quick overview of their team’s workload. You can see everyone’s tasks and appointments for today, total duration of appointments, as well as what’s on their Worklist–separated by each team member. This new feature allows you to manage the workload of your team making sure everyone is busy but not too busy.

“This new feature is an easy way to get a big picture view of how my teams are doing. It makes it easy for me to delegate tasks, check on task status, compare work loads for individuals/teams, and creates a continuity for me between individuals and teams.”

– Libby Flores, COO of E.L. Achieve

Libby and her team have been using Daylite for years to manage their projects and clients. Together they manage between 120-160 projects at a time and rely on Daylite to share and keep track of everyone’s tasks and project info. 

If you are managing a small to medium sized business, you can’t go wrong with Daylite. It works on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and gives you and your team one place to manage tasks, contacts, calendars, email, and all those other bits you need to make your business successful. Head over to Daylite today and learn more.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniFocus from the Omni Group. Last week I just spent several days at the American Bar Association conference where I talked to a lot of lawyers using OmniFocus to hold things together. That shouldn’t surprise you though. OmniFocus is a powerful tool and people that have a lot of tasks to manage love OmniFocus. 

One of the things I love about OmniFocus in particular (and the Omni Group in general) is the way they obsess over small details to make things easier on their users. You can see this in the OmniFocus check circles. In most task management applications the check box is just that … a check box. Not true with OmniFocus.

The OmniFocus check circle shows the status of the attached task. This clever system allows you to immediately understand the status of your task and makes working with OmniFocus that much easier. If the Omni Group spent this much time thinking about how the check-circle works, how much do you think they thought about the rest of the application?
If you would like to up your productivity game, check out OmniFocus.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by MailButler. MailButler has just added a new Business subscription plan that includes several features to ensure complete control over email flow for your team. This includes several new features including:

Advanced Tracking

MailButler adds links to your emails so you can seen all the details about your email recipients opening your email messages. Learn when, where, how often, with what kind of device, and in which email client your messages have been viewed. Now you’ll know if your customer has actually opened the email with their invoice or if your colleague received the email with the new spreadsheet.

CRM Support

Customer relationship managers are an essential tool for business but wrangling your email into them has never been easy. MailButler now lets you connect with your CRM tool you automatically get  copies of your outgoing emails in the system through a blind carbon copy.

Correspondent Insight

MailButler Business Plan users also get additional insight on their email correspondents with detailed information, such as social media profiles and company information. 

Custom Signature Templates

MailButler Business Plan members don’t only get the cool MailButler template designer to create their own custom email signature, they can also make a unique corporate signature design and share it with their team members. Give your team a unified, professional looking email signature.

Team Features

Best of all, these team member features are easy to manage using the MailButler Business Plan Dashboard where managers can assign roles and tasks to the team members, watch their activity and usage statistics, as well as share custom signature or message templates.

MailButler’s new Business Plan is a great idea. Take control of email for your team with MailButler for Business.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can can change your life … today. For a lot of folks, email is that thorn in your side that you can’t quite ever escape. It doesn’t have to be that way. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

• Wake up everyday to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 
• Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
• Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
• Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
• Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
• Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. I’ve been a SaneBox subscriber since 2012 and just signed up for another year. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite. 

For small companies, staying on top of clients, leads, and projects can feel chaotic. Daylite helps you streamline your workflow so you can win more business and get more done.

Daylite is a business productivity app for the Mac, iPhone & iPad. It’s like having a CRM, Project Management, and Lead Management app all rolled into one. It integrates with Apple Mail, and you can share it with your team to keep everyone in the loop.

Whether you’re in real estate, sales, design, or the legal industry, Daylite can help you track leads, stay on top of clients, and deliver projects on time. 

Daylite also integrates with the iPhone and iPad so you can leverage features like Multitasking, Caller ID, Siri, and more.

Visit marketcircle.com/Daylite to try Daylite free for 30 days!

∞

This week MacSparky has a new sponsor, TableFlip. No matter what app you’re working in, creating tables is a pain in the neck. TableFlip solves that problem with you letting you create tables using Markdown and getting a live preview right in the app. 

After you create your table you can update the underlying Markdown file or the table preview and both the TableFlip and Markdown files update automatically. I like setting up the table in TableFlip to begin, and then going back to the Markdown file for quick changes.

If you don’t want to use Markdown, you can also use TableFlip independently to create a table and later use it in Markdown or CSV. (Additional formats are on their way.) 

You shouldn’t have to open Excel every time you need a table. Check out TableFlip

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the app that I use as my own personal graphics toolbox, OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle was created as a diagramming tool but it is so much more. Using OmniGraffle’s powerful, but easily understandable tools, I am able to not only make diagrams but also maps, flow charts, court exhibits, garden plans, countless school projects, and even the family Christmas card. If I’m doing something that involves moving pixels around the screen, OmniGraffle delivers.

OmniGraffle users range from artists to data mappers to (even) geeky lawyers. The tools are fast and easy to learn and there are versions of OmniGraffle for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I frequently hear from readers that are OmniGraffle-curious. They are interested in the app but not sure whether it is something they need. My answer is always the same. If you have OmniGraffle, you will find uses for it and the diagrams you make in it will look professional and better than anything you’ve been making before. 

The OmniGroup has recently released OmniGraffle version 7 and the app has so much polish now. Everything is cleaner and easier to use and access to Stenciltown (where you can import and use other folks’ art work in your diagrams) is easier than ever. Best of all, there’s a free trial so you can download and try it risk free. Up your diagram game today with OmniGraffle.