Keeping up with your contacts

If you are anything like me, you have a flood of email coming into your Gmail inbox every day. The emails vary from suppliers to customers to friends and family to junk email. Learning to sift through the information is a science which is greatly helped by using filters. 

But, one thing which is not so easy to keep on top of is the number of contact details which need to be collected and stored. Up until recently, I used to have to copy and paste all new contacts and their details into my Gmail 'Contacts' section manually, which was necessary but time-consuming and dull.

Fortunately, I came across a service recently which cuts out all of the manual hassle of collecting contacts details in Gmail and does it all for you at the click of a button.

The service is called 'WriteThat.Name' and is an extension in Gmail, but can also be used in Microsoft Outlook too. In Gmail, it monitors your incoming emails for contact details and then sends you an email once a day to ask which details you want to save into your 'Contact's folder. You can either add each contact in one by one (with the click of a button!) or add all of them at once, which helps you filter out the good contacts from the junk.

There is a free plan which allows up to 10 contact updates per month. Or, there are a range of other paid-for services which vary according to the volume of contacts you need to add.

WriteThat.Name is a great time-saver which is easy to use and doesn't cost a great deal. Anyone who gets fed up with the grind of copying and pasting contacts into their Gmail or Outlook software will do well to take a look at this tool. You can get a month long free trial too.