Organising your webmail
Themes
Most webmail services let you customise the website’s colour scheme by means of “themes”. With a classy background or a fresh colour, your e-mail service will automatically look much more attractive! In Outlook.com (http://www.outlook.com), the Options button only lets you change the main colour, which is used for the bar at the top and for highlighting text (for instance, unread messages). Gmail (http://mail.google.com) can be customised in many more ways, via Options; Themes. There are themes with matching colours, drawings and photos. Some themes apply a light background, others have a darker one. In addition, you can use your own photos to create a customised theme. The themes at Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) are comparable to those of Gmail, but the choice is a bit more limited.
Preview pane
The default layout in almost all webmail services consists of the list of folders at the left and the list of messages in the selected folder at the right.
In regular e-mail programs such as Outlook, there’s also a third pane, the Preview Pane, showing the text of the selected message. This is ideal for processing new messages efficiently. In Outlook.com, you can activate the preview window via Options; Preview Window. This pane can be positioned at the right or at the bottom. Gmail also lets you open a preview window. However, this function is not among the ordinary options but with the experimental Labs features. After activating the Preview Pane lab, you will see a preview window at the right, plus a new button which lets you switch between a view with or without a preview pane. At the top of your message list, Yahoo! Mail has a button for opening the preview window, always shown at the bottom. Below the preview window, Yahoo! Mail provides an extra field where you can draft a quick reply.
Tip. All three services let you move the dividing line between the windows in order to modify the relative size of the panes.
Information and layout
The amount of information shown on your screen and the layout are important elements too, as they help you to focus on what is really important.
By default, Yahoo! Mail splits up the list of messages into multiple pages. The number of messages per page is configurable between 50 and 200. It’s best to opt for fewer messages per page - for instance, you shouldn’t have more than 50 or 100 recent active messages on one single page. In addition, you can use the Automatic Organizer in order to keep important messages at the top of your mailbox.
Gmail offers even more options. You can configure not only the number of messages per page but also the line spacing of the text. It’s best to experiment with this feature first. In addition, you can work with different types of inboxes: standard, unread messages at the top or important ones first. Finally, you can add markers to messages which tell you at a glance which e-mails are important or have been sent to your address only. In Outlook.com, the number of messages per page is fixed, but there are different “views”, for example only unread mail, or only messages from your contacts.
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