The (new & improved) Email Game is here!

Posted By on Oct 26, 2011


If you haven’t already heard, in addition to Boomerang, we make a game to help you power through a full inbox like never before. What is this magical game you ask? It’s called The Email Game, of course, and the core idea is to process your email quickly, in batches, without distractions.

We released the first version a few months back, and today we’re excited to release a major update. What’s new? Almost everything. We’ve added the best meeting scheduling system you’ve ever seen—a context aware way to make short work of planning meetings without ever having to leave your inbox. We’ve tucked away the point system and replaced it with real emotional feedback. The Email Game can also now help you make better decisions and offers customizable templates to make common replies a cinch. We’ve also listened to your requests and added the features you needed the most: message threading, attachments, keyboard shortcuts, autocompletion of email addresses, and more. Finally, we retouched the look of our entire UI.

Check out our preview video and some more highlights of our favorite features below, or jump right in and play now.

Smileys – First things first: we tweaked the gaming mechanics based on results from the past year. Smileys are in, points are out.


As you take action on your emails, his expression will change, giving you real emotional feedback, instantly. The more actions you take, the happier he gets. But don’t skip too many messages—he gets pretty sad as well.

For those of you interested in competing with friends or wondering how your session measured up, don’t worry. You can still earn points, and you will be able to see score at the end of the session.

 

Google Calendar Integration and Smart Scheduling – Scheduling has always wanted to work this way. The Email Game automatically detects dates within messages and adds them to your Google Calendar with the click of a button. You can check if you’re free immediately and reply with a customizable template that’s optimized to make sure everything is communicated properly. Not free at the time they suggested? The Email Game now includes a magical drag-and-drop rescheduling app that makes it incredibly easy for you to suggest alternative times without making mistakes.


Quick Replies
 – Copy-and-paste no longer. The Email Game now has Quick Replies!

Quick Replies are a set of customizable saved responses that can be inserted into any reply. So instead of rewriting the same responses over and over, build up a set of Quick Replies to cover your bases.

The Quick Reply interface is dead simple. To insert a Quick Reply, just click one of the preset responses or create and save a set of your own.

 

New Interface Artwork and Icons – Even the look and feel of The Email Game is different. It may not look as exciting as your typical video game, but we think the new design will help you get in and out of your inbox as quickly as possible.

 

Help Me Decide – Should you reply to that message? Would you rather go hiking or fishing this weekend? We know it’s hard to decide what to do sometimes, and we also happen to know that these decisions waste a ton of time and drain your energy at a frightening clip. To speed things up, we built a decision making platform that gives you a default choice. There’s nothing like having someone else make your tough decisions, right?

We’ve found this tool much more valuable than flipping a coin. If you’re having a hard time making a final decision on something, it sometimes helps to give the Cosmos a voice in the decision—set the chances to be very biased toward your instincts, then when the answer comes up “no” it’s much easier to have finality on the decision. You may also find that having a default choice turns a difficult decision into an easy one, when your gut immediately protests the way the decision came out.


Speed 
– The nuts and bolts have all been tightened. It’s faster than ever.

Threading – Conversations in The Email Game are now threaded. We worked really hard to write a better threading algorithm than Gmail’s. The Email Game will break up the conversations that Gmail groups when they’re not really part of the same conversation, and will group the ones that are.

Google Contact Integration – The new version is fully integrated with Google Contacts and autofills the address fields as you type. If you’ve ever struggled to remember if it’s frankdatank2222@gmail.com or frankdatank1111@gmail.com, this one’s for you!

Attachments – Attachments aren’t dead yet, unfortunately. Now you can upload files with your emails without having to leave the Email Game.

Keyboard shortcuts – In case you addicted to keyboard shortcuts, you can now use most of the Gmail shortcuts in The Email Game as well. If you want to use these, just make sure they are enabled from the Settings page.

New text editor – The old text editor got it done, but the new one is considerably more slick and responsive.

 

So…what are you waiting for? Conquer your inbox

1 Comment

  1. Keyboard shortcuts : YES !

    That was one of my reasons not to exploit the game, I’m much fast in Gmail because of shortcuts…

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