Tips To Help Students Pick an Email App That Is Ideal for Their Needs

College students need to use email for corresponding with professors, collaborating with classmates, and keeping in touch with friends and family. 

Although any email app will let you do the basics of sending, receiving, reading, and replying to emails, the best email platforms have extra built-in features and tools that allow you to do so much more. 

For students, choosing the right email client can help you study better, make collaborating on group projects easier, and increase your overall productivity. Here are some tips for picking the best email app when you’re in college or university:

Look for an email app with collaborative notes

Having collaborative notes in your email app is super helpful for taking study notes and working on group projects.

You can pick a group of classmates to work on joint notes with together, which leads to more comprehensive, more detailed, and more accurate study notes. Not only that, but if you miss a class, you can still refer to other peoples’ notes to catch up on what you missed.

Pick an email client with tasks and to-do lists

When you’re in school, you need an app that helps you stay organized and keep track of all your ongoing tasks and to-dos for your different courses.

That’s why you should use an email app that also lets you create tasks and to-do lists. When these productivity tools are built into your email, you can easily create a to-do whenever a professor or classmate sends you an email regarding homework or a project.

Make sure you can sync multiple calendars

As a student, you have tons of important dates and deadlines to keep track of, in both your personal and academic lives.

So, make sure any email app you use lets you sync all your different calendars to stay on top of all your dates in one place.

That way, you won’t miss the deadline to turn in a paper or forget about your parents’ birthdays because you’re too busy studying!

Choose an email app with built-in chat

Your generation is so much more used to instant messaging, which means emailing often feels like a clunky, outdated form of communication.

While you definitely still need email for certain things in your academic career, using an email app with a built-in chat feature can make communicating casually with classmates, professors, friends, and family much easier and more natural.

For instance, if you can create a group chat within your email app, you can make different group chats for all your different study groups, projects, or classes. 

This makes collaborating and communicating about courses more efficient and productive, so you can get the highest grade possible!

Get an Email App with Integrated Video Meetings

Whether you’re attending college or university in person or taking online courses, video meetings are a must-have tool. 

For everything from group study sessions to collaborating on group projects, video conferencing can help you get the job done. And, if you’re away from home, video meetings are a great way to stay in touch with friends and family.

Sure, there are plenty of dedicated video meeting apps out there, but the more productivity tools you have built into your email platform, the better.

The less different apps and platforms you have to use at school, the less time you spend switching back and forth between different screens and tools (a concept called context switching).

Less time spent switching contexts means more time for studying and getting homework done, and by now you probably know how valuable every second is when you’re in school!

Integrated Voice Messages Are a Plus

Sometimes text-based messaging, even instant messaging, just isn’t the best way to express yourself. This is why having built-in voice messages in your email platform can be a huge plus.

When you want to express yourself verbally, you can simply press and hold a button to record a voice note and send it via email or group chat to the person or people who need the information.

This is also great for when you’re on the go and typing out a message is too hard or not practical or fast enough.

Check for Advanced Search Functionality

When you’re in school, a lot of important information may be stored in old emails, and you want to be able to find that information fast.

So, make sure any email app you use has an advanced search feature that allows you to quickly search for messages using keywords and tags, by sender/receiver, and by subject line.

That way, you aren’t spending precious time scrolling through your entire inbox to find a specific piece of information or an important attachment.

Reduce Clutter with Priority Filtering

If you use your email account for multiple things outside school, chances are you get a lot of low-priority emails. These might include things like newsletters, promotions, notifications from other apps, and receipts. 

Pick an email app that lets you automatically filter this stuff to a separate folder to deal with later, so you can focus on the most important emails while you’re in school mode.