Loading...You receive emails from people who maybe unknown to you yet very important in some official way. There are people you need to deal with via email without having any information about them. Well wouldn’t you want to have rough information about the person you’re exchanging emails with? Or even if you are exchanging emails with a friend, Rapportive would prove fruitful as you can instantly see what your friend is sharing on his social networks. Rapportive, a Gmail plugin takes a step towards letting you see the background info on a person sending you emails.
What Rapportive does is replaces the sidebar ads in Gmail with a clean widget showing information on the sender of the email. Besides this, you can also add notes to the profile of a person shown on the Rapportive widget. Information regarding the career of the person, his Twitter updates, links to his social networks namely Facebook, Skype, Flickr etc. can be seen on the widget. It actually looks through the social networks using the email address of the sender.
Upon installing Rapportive on Firefox, you’ll see a sidebar in place of the Gmail ad bar on the right hand side of Gmail when you open any of your emails. Rapportive works on Firefox, Safari or Chrome perfectly well. Click on the install button on Rapportive’s website and it will automatically detect your browser version and let you download the necessary plugin. Next it will ask to sign in to Rapportive; don’t worry, all you need to do is authenticate Rapportive with Gmail. You’ll only be able to add personal notes to Rapportive once you sign in to it using Gmail. Don’t worry, these notes are private and you can see or edit them using the same Rapportive widget. You can add things like the person’s phone number, address and so on.
You can also edit your own profile on Rapportive. You can add social networks and your career information so that they will be viewable to the people you send emails to(if they have rapportive installed on their browser).
Rapportive has a chunk of other plugins that can be added to it; much like adding userscripts to Greasemonkey. For these other plugins to work, the Rapportive must be installed. Rapportive calls them raplets and there are a number of useful Raplets. Some of the Raplets provided by Rapportive are MailChimp-a email marketing plugin, BrightPearl-for Accounting and CRM, Batchbook- Social CRM, Contact management plugin, Bantam Live-Team workspace with contact management, CRM and social networks integration plugin.
Rapportive is a very useful plugin for Gmail and with the features it offers, it will probably grow in the future.