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By Rahul Saigal Edited by Justin Pot share: This manual is the intellectual property of MakeUseOf. It must only be published in its original form. Using parts or republishing altered parts of this guide is prohibited without permission from MakeUseOf.com Think you’ve got what it takes to write a manual for MakeUseOf.com? We’re always willing to hear a pitch! Send your ideas to justinpot@makeuseof.com; you might earn up to $400. WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 Table of Contents Introduction 1. Control Your Email  4  5 1.1 Email overload: Why is it a major problem for users? 5 1.2 Organize your inbox and unsubscribe from mailing lists 5 Unroll.me  6 Swizzle Inbox Manager  6 OtherInbox  6 Sanebox  7 1.3 Set up automated rules to filter messages 8 Creating Filters 8 1.4 Schedule your messages automatically 10 1.5 Automate repetitive replies 11 1.6 Send paper mail right from home 13 2. Control Your Relationship With Social Media 14 2.1 Social media automation - right or wrong? 14 2.2 Schedule your posts cleverly 14 2.3 Automate your social activities and manage multiple accounts 16 2.4 Understand and follow your followers scientifically 17 2.5 Monitor web search, services or products automatically 19 Tips for Google Alerts:  20 HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 3 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 Introduction Some say necessity is the mother of invention. Nonsense. I think laziness is the mother of invention. Our ancestors invented things too, didn’t they? Mankind develops new technologies quickly, all to make our lives simpler and more comfortable. Simple is just another word for easy, however, so you could argue we made such great progress because we didn’t want to do quite so much work. Amazing thought, isn’t it? The world absolutely condemns lazy behavior, but deep down we are all engaged with it. We have dishwashers so we don’t need to manually wash dishes, and robot vaccums so we don’t need to push a vaccum. So why not let tasks you have to do on web be done by the web itself? Welcome you to the world of web automation, where we have started to control the web in our own way. Imagine these situations: 1. You have multiple social accounts and it is becoming difficult to share data between accounts, not to mention contacts. They are scattered everywhere (email, social media, phone). 2. You are spending lots of time organizing and filtering thousands of messages in email. 3. You are spending lots of time doing backups and saving them to a cloud storage service. It may be daunting to some of you to perform these tasks, and some may not realize there is any other option available. However, it is possible to automate these tasks and it’s up to your judgment to decide whether automation is a good or bad thing for you. Later on, as you become adjusted to automating, you may realize that it is saving you time and increasing your productivity. This manual is created for readers like you, who spend much of their quality time digitally and would like to manage daily tasks effectively. I, the author, do not have any affiliation or financial commitment to any of the tools or services discussed in this manual. Thoughout the manual I will teach you how I use automation tools in order to improve my life. Don’t feel like you need to follow them to-the-letter; instead, think of them as ideas you can use as you search for your own solution. With that in mind let’s get started! HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 4 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 1. Control Your Email 1.1 Email overload: Why is it a major problem for users? Email brought a revolution in the field of communication and for the past few decades it has developed from a simple asynchronous communication medium to an omnipresent application covering a range of information management functions (to-do list, calendar, contacts management). The purpose of email is to exchange digital messages from an author to one or more recipients globally without any restrictions. Today we are not using email only for what it was meant for, causing information overload. If you spend some time analyzing the nature of the emails in your inbox it may fall into the following categories: 1. You are co-coordinating your schedule via email with your friends for organizing events such as birthday parties. 2. You co-ordinate your work back and forth as email with attachments. For instance, you may be an author discussing article changes with an editor. 3. You are keeping your to-do list in your email inbox. 4. You are keeping piles of notes, bookmarks and important documents unsorted in your email. 5. You are storing usernames and passwords for website logins are kept in emails. 6. Your email contacts are your main address book of your contacts. If your email happens to fall in the majority of these categories then you are a victim of email overload. Email overload is often measured in terms of the number of messages which the user needs to process and which demand their attention. But, is it really a problem? Yes, because we are managing our professional and personal lives through one platform that provides the strong functionality a user needs, but at the cost of simplicity. So how does email overload make a user less effective? Here’s how: 1. Prioritization becomes difficult. Even if the user knows which messages are important, the inbox is not built in that order. It may also be the user doesn’t understand the implications of a given message at a glance of the subject line. 2. It makes it hard to find messages with same person or subject line, so the user opens every message in order to find the correct one and if he is unable to find it, either he will waste time searching or request that the sender re-sends it. 3. If you are using Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, then overfilled inboxes may crash the program, leading to loss of contents. There is still controversy in the subject of managing email overload, and there may not be one ideal solution. A simple Google search will result in endless amount of articles online, each written by people who have devised individual strategies around better managing the email deluge and maximizing productivity. The onus on the user is to intelligently manage the influx of email, and if users are given tools and freedom to develop their own system with sensible guidelines it can be managed effectively. 1.2 Organize your inbox and unsubscribe from mailing lists Managing the flood of email messages that most of us need to interact with on a daily basis is a growing challenge. Getting a good grip on it with a good systematic approach is critical for staying sane. Because of the volume of discrete messages and the speed with which they show up, email seems to be a unique demon and the sad part is that it cannot be managed with a single solution. It requires good tools, freedom and a certain dedication to keep your inbox free from junk, which allows you to regularly empty it. HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 5 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 Let’s start with those countless newsletters that you have subscribed to, and now you don’t even care to read. If you are not reading a given newsletter what’s the point of staying subscribed to it? 1. Unroll.me Unroll.me is an effective solution for those who want to get rid of junk newsletters from their inbox. The concept and execution is pretty simple. Select your account type and input your email address. Authenticate it to allow connection with your inbox. Now they will import all of your mail headers into their system and identify the lists you are subscribed to. Unroll.me has created an itemized list of all the newsletters that I am subscribed to, and I can simply click on minus icon to clear the list. The good thing about this app is the simplicity, and while doing the import, I can clear the mailing list as soon they get identified. Another helpful feature is “Rollup”, which behaves like a digest to give you an overview of all the subscriptions received each day (customizable). You can filter it by categories or add items to favorites. It also keeps a list of all newsletters so you can re-subscribe to them if you have unsubscribed and then change your mind later on. If some messages are picked up as a newsletter that shouldn’t be included, then you can move it to the “Direct to inbox” category. So, this process is not 100% accurate but at least they offer you the option to correct it. Right now, this app works only with Google email accounts but they are working to integrate it with other email services. 2. Swizzle Inbox Manager Swizzle Inbox Manager is another service that scans your email to find newsletters and subscriptions. The concept is simple: select your account type and input your email address. It works with all email services, including AOL and iCloud. Authenticate it to allow connection with your inbox. Then it will start scanning the inbox. It has created an itemized list of all the newsletters that I am subscribed to, and I can simply click unsubscribe to clear the list. The process is not 100% accurate and some sensitive messages are also listed which are not newsletters, but they do not offer any option to direct that message back to inbox. Swizzle Inbox Manager also includes a deals/newsletter browser, where you can read and look for deals from brands in all categories without subscribing to them. 3. OtherInbox OtherInbox’s opening statement is exactly why I’m writing its review: “Email is our life, so it doesn’t have to be yours”. They have two different tools, the first of which is the Organizer that automatically organizes your emails based on their category. The second tool is Unsubscriber, which easily unsubscribes you from any junk newsletters. To start using Organizer, just sign-up and select your email address (currently supports AOL, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud). Authenticate it to allow connection with the inbox. This application requires Flash so you must enable it if you haven’t yet. The processing of email takes time if you have lots of messages in your inbox, but if you are already organized it may take less time. HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 6 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 The basic idea behind OtherInbox is to categorize emails on the basis of their source. If the source is Amazon, all emails from Amazon are automatically placed in one folder and if the source is Facebook, all the notifications will go into another folder. The change is not instantaneous, and it will show you the preview of its planned organization so that you can accept or decline the changes. The user also receives an email digest showing you the summary of all the automated messages and what OtherInbox has done with them. I found that it took a long time to search through my emails and it created more folders than I wanted. After a detailed search I found out OtherInbox were bought by an email certification and reputation monitoring company, Return Path. Nevertheless, if you have lots of emails in your inbox and organizing it for now is a mess then give it a try, but if you are already organized and can make better decisions with your emails yourself, then maybe it’s not worth it for you to use this application. 4. Sanebox Sanebox is a service that works by filtering your email inbox and shows you only the emails that must be dealt right away as compared to the ones that can wait for few hours. The service looks surprisingly similar to Gmail Priority Inbox, but Sanebox works differently: it gives the entire control to the user. According to its privacy policy, Sanebox is not a spam filter and doesn’t read the body of your email, change any headers or store email on its servers. It works with almost any email service including Android and iPhone clients. To start using Sanebox you can sign up for the free trial (14 days) and authenticated it with your Gmail account. Once you set it up, it scans your inbox headers to determine if each message is important or not. If it is not important, it will go to the @SaneLater label using its own algorithm. The filtration of Sanebox is highly effective, but as with any service the algorithm may not be 100% correct. To combat that you can train Sanebox to suit your needs by moving the email to the correct category. This feature is certainly unique. They also email the analysis of your email so you can better understand its algorithm. If you add your social networks to Sanebox, it will prioritize emails from people you follow on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. It is faster to follow these low priority emails when they are batched together. I was able to search email normally and found the messages don’t get lost. Another feature of Sanebox is the daily email digest. It will email you a conventional list of all new and unread @ SaneLater email. This feature looked nice, though I didn’t find a use for it. It may be due to the low volume of email messages I process per day. There are loads of other SaneLater features: 1. Folders according to the category (e.g. - All important mails go to @SaneTop, All receipts and reference mails go to @SaneBulk, All old mails go to @SaneArchive). I can even add a custom filing folder. 2. Move email to @SaneBlackHole and you won’t ever get that mail from that address again. Even in my limited testing time it was effective. So, it was much easier than creating filters. HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 7 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 3. You can also create a @SaneRemindMe folder to notify you when an important email you sent wasn’t responded to within a certain time. 4. You can connect with Dropbox to save attachments (customizable), to add links and more. This is really helpful if you use any email service with limited storage options. There were some minor issues with Sanebox too; it was not able to differentiate the summary and breaking news that I get periodically from Google Alert. Since Sanebox does not read the body of your message, it’s quite understandable and I was able to work around it. After my trial was over I was worried about whether it will restore my email account to the way it was, but there were no issues at all. The service costs $5 a month, which is not bad considering the features it offers. It will certainly save you time. So let me summarize whether automation can help in this aspect of email management or not: • Automation is good if you have to process lots of email per day, if you have multiple newsletters that you want to unsubscribe to, and if you love organizing everything. • Automation is bad when these services are not perfect; you have to train them to certain extent. If you have certain privacy issues with giving control of your email to these services, then it may not be ideal. 1.3 Set up automated rules to filter messages Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The criteria could be to automatically process your incoming messages, spam or outgoing messages according to certain rules. For example, you may want to create a filter to have all newsletters separate from your everyday mails. You may create filters for work, family members, spam or anything. So basically, each filter is a rule with one or more conditions and an action, wherein the conditions include: • Specific addresses in the From:,To:,Cc: addresses in the email header. • Words/characters in the strings in the subject or body of the mail message. • The presence or absence of file attachments. And actions include: • Moving the message to another specified folder/label. • Forwarding the message to another address. • Skipping the Inbox (To archive it). • Never sending messages like this to spam. Creating Filters How to set up a filter or a rule varies depending on what you use for email. The following instructions assume you use Gmail. To set up an email filter, click on the icon that looks like a gear and then select Settings. If you already have filters set up, they will be displayed. As you can see in, my first filter has one condition and its action is to skip inbox, delete it. So if I now want to create a filter, scroll down and simply click on Create a new filter. You will then be prompted with a popup box to provide criteria to base the filter on. You can set the following criteria: HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 8 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 • From: Whom the email is from. This could be an email address or a phrase (e.g. MakeUseOf). • To: You may have email forwarding or POP access set up on your Gmail account so all your work emails get sent to your primary Gmail • account. Enter your primary Gmail account in the To box, then the filter will automatically send your specific, incoming messages to that email address. • Subject: If you enter a phrase in the Subject, any emails with that phrase in the subject would have the filter applied. • Has the words: If the contents of the email has the words you specify, then filter will apply. • Doesn’t have: For all emails that do not contain the phrase you specify, the filter will apply. • Has attachment: Any email with a file attached will trigger the filter. We will now fill up the From field with the email address of MakeUseOf. Since our condition is now set, let me list out some of the most common filter rules: • Forums - I can’t deny that forums are an evergrowing part of the Internet, just like social networking sites. Forum users usually receive messages once they get registered or subscribe to threads with email notification. It’s usually perfectly fine until we observe that our inbox is getting filled up. We can then create some filters on the basis of their default email template. The key is to type in Subject “Reply to thread”, “You are subscribed to the forum”, “Topic reply notification” or Has the words “Your password has been securely stored in our database and cannot be retrieved”. There can be many words/subjects like these but if we want to clump two or three filters together at a time, then it would be better to learn Google search operands or make this operand as a sticky note. • Search - We can create filter for frequent search queries. Just type your query in the “Has the words” box. For example - has:attachment (messages that include attachments), filename:.pdf (messages that include pdf attachments), is:unread (collects all the messages you haven’t read yet), label:voicemail (the voicemail from Google Talk). • Separate your identities - We can a create filter to forward messages from other email accounts. Just enter the appropriate mail address in the To field when you create each filter. One specific thing I would like to mention is about Evernote. Evernote users can send virtually any content to their private Evernote email address. I have created a filter for forwarding student assignments to Evernote, while annotating them and tagging them as results. Simply add the name of the notebook preceded by the “at” symbol (@) and add any tags by preceding them with tags (#). The syntax should look like this: Results! @ Notebook #tag1 #tag2. The notebook and tags should exist in your Evernote database already and the note title must come first, followed by tags and notebook. • Newsletters - We can create filters for daily newsletters, just fill in the email address or phrase in the From field or Has the words “unsubscribe” and HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 9 share: WEB AUTOMATION PART 1 select any action, which we will discuss later on. • Blacklist - If you don’t want to read messages from certain people, create a filter that sends their messages to the trash. Just enter their email address in the From field or if you want to clump more than one email address then separate it by OR in the From field. There are endless possibilities to play around with filters. Have you created filters for managing shopping lists or details from bank accounts? Think about the common words that are present in the body of the message such as “receipt” or common subject such as “invoice”, “order”. Experiment with it, and once you are done you will have to select certain action for that message (consider the example of newsletter from MakeUseOf). After verifying the email address, click Create filter with this search. A new pop-up box will be activated as shown in Fig 1.3(e). Tick Skip the Inbox and apply the label of your choice. Finally click Create filter. After applying this filter, the entire incoming newsletter from MakeUseOf will directly go to that label, without your intervention. 1.4 Schedule your messages automatically Why schedule an email to be sent later? There must be some reasons: 1. Create scheduled emails to send greetings or congratulations for marriage anniversaries, birthdays and other important occasions. 2. Set up a reminder of particular task, e.g. to backup emails, submitting quarterly or monthly reports of the company. 3. Set up scheduled emails to clients and customers about product information or discounts or regular updates. 4. Set up a schedule for your newsletters. 5. Follow up on important email messages. We are going to setup the Thunderbird email client to schedule email messages. By default, Thunderbird does not offer email-scheduling options and it requires a manual workaround to send out emails at a specified time. We’ll use an extension called as Send Later 3, which does exactly what to the name implies it will do. If you have the latest Thunderbird release, I would recommend using the latest beta version (make sure you backup your emails before that, just in case). The latest extension can be downloaded from here. 1. Download the extension. Save the .xpi file in a folder. 2. From Thunderbird Tools menu, choose that addon and go through the installation steps. 3. When you want to schedule a message for later delivery, either select the File>Send Later command or hit Ctrl-Shift-Return. This will pop up the following dialog. From this dialog: 1. Specify a specific time at which to send the message - Enter date/time and you will notice that the button below it will become active and “Enter a valid date above” will be replaced with what you entered. Click the button to schedule the message. 2. Send the message using one of the preset buttons. Click “15 mins later”, “30 mins later”, or “2 hours later” to send the message the indicated amount of time into the future. 3. If you click Put in Outbox, the message will be copied into your Outbox and the message will be sent when you go into and out of offline mode, or if you restart thunderbird. 4. If you click the Send Now button the message will be delivered immediately. HTTP://MAKEUSEOF.COM RAHUL SAIGAL 10 share: