This is the best way to manage your mail ever. I get a good amount of mail everyday, I use Inbox since day 1, and this is just too good. I can quickly scan a tag/inbox, and if I doesn't see anything relevant, just click on done, goodbye. See something you wants to do later? Just pin it. It'll stay on top. Everyone should give it a try. The product is very well done, and if you care enough about your mail to try new things on your workflow, just use it, you'll never come back.
Completely agree. I wrote a blog post about it a while back [0], but to me the killer feature is being able to pin items as to-dos (or create new todo's unassociated with an email), and then flip the switch so that you ONLY see these pinned items.
I love it because I can only look at my pinned items and focus on knocking a few out at a time, and only occasionally flipping back to the regular inbox view. (Which I find distracting when I need to focus.)
Personally I'd love to try it, but all my work email is on Google Apps, not GMail, so no dice. I wish they had prioritized this because for me Inbox makes no sense for a low volume personal email account, which is what I use GMail for.
It doesn't sync with their previous star system, so you're unable to move back and forth on services when Inbox is buggy or vice versa. Inbox doesn't store any mail locally on mobile, so you're unable to search without an internet connection -- I am on the subway frequently and this is very problematic. With GMail, you have a one click delete system; with Inbox, you have two steps to permanently delete a message. This is cumbersome when you receive "a good amount of email", and you want to delete rather than archive.
It's a cleaner design, and the other features are nice incremental improvements, but the new features do not outweigh the benefits that the existing GMail app and service offers.
Eh... is there any way to email a list of people without constantly adding them one. by. one. every time?
I often use gmail to send emails to my family and I just have a "Family" contact group setup in Gmail to do that (so in Gmail I just type "F" "a" "m" <tab> in the To: box and it's all setup). Most annoying aspect for me to using Gmail on Android and using Inbox in general, honestly.
Inbox is amazing for consuming incoming mail, and I'm hoping it will soon be able to consume Exchange.
I thought maybe +circles replaced that, but I can't even figure out how to send an email to a +circle.
Either I'm really dumb, or something obvious is missing.
I tried using it, but all the "pretty images" I found obnoxious. Although I do like the "sleep" style options, where I can put stuff to sleep and get notified later. I noticed my email throughput had decreased significantly using Inbox.
I receive somewhere between 75 - 200 emails a day. I need to quickly scan over the email titles + bodies and just remove emails that are not necessary to respond to. Inbox doesn't really provide data as clearly. Though, if I wasn't receiving an email every few minutes Inbox does seem like a really awesome choice.
Eh honestly Mailbox by Dropbox does a better job. There are no silly bundles that Mailbox forces you into, better snoozes, as well as just a better mobile app.
Plus, there's the huge risk that Google will kill this off in a year or so. Based on that history alone, all users should be reluctant to get on board with it.
This is a source of frustration for me. I like the idea of Google Now, but as an Apps user, it is almost worthless as you cannot use Gmail cards. Gmail cards are the source of interesting things like flight status, package tracking, etc. Even more, I routinely have issues where upcoming appointments don't show up although I do not know if that is caused by being an Apps user.
I truly don't get the delay on both Inbox and Now - are the backend Gmail systems completely different? If it's just a worry that "enterprise won't like it," why not allow it to be turned on/off from the Admin console like so many other things?
I still prefer Priority Inbox that's been around a few years now. I gave Inbox a shot, and it's very pretty, but I ultimately didn't find it as useful. Maybe I need to find the right settings to get Inbox to work the way I want, but... I'd be just as happy to not do that and stick with Priority Inbox.
What I like about Priority Inbox is that it shows me important emails, regardless of the type ("type" meaning the different categories that Inbox has). I.e., I don't generally care about "Promos" or "Updates," but there are a select few within them that I do care about. Priority Inbox figures that out, and promotes those particular ones. Inbox just groups them all together, so to see the one "Update" that I care about, I'd have to sift through that whole category to see it.
Gmail occasionally tries to convince me to switch to Inbox. I hope it's not the case that we'll all eventually be forced to switch...
Watching a talk from one of the guys that worked on Inbox, they built a lot of what they did on the power of what GMail already has. But their goal was to create a common flow that would handle most people's use-case. From what I've seen of inbox right now, there isn't a lot you can do to customize it. So until they start porting over features from GMail, I'd probably just stick with Priority Inbox if you like it's flow.
For me, Inbox solves my use-case for my personal email account. I never really put much time into organizing my gmail account to minimize noise, so Inbox was a good answer for me. Now, if Inbox was available for my work account I doubt I'd use it. I have carefully crafted lots of labels and filters to make Gmail an excellent solution for work, it just took more time to setup and maintain then what Inbox does for my personal email.
Agree completely with this. I love the "mark and sweep" aspect of Inbox, but after a couple of months with it, I think I have to go back to the old interface.
I tried Inbox when it first started and I can say I pretty much hate it. It seems like it is a change just for changes sake. It doesn't seem to make me more productive in my inbox, only more frustrated that I can't seem to find the things I want. Everything seems jumbled and just is a mess. If they make it the default I can see myself actually going back to a desktop client and using something else for a mobile client.
I had the opposite experience. I managed to go through my entire 5 years worth of old emails and get down to inbox zero.
I love the snooze and pin features. The Android app is awesome. Swip to archive is such a nice way to deal with email, which (in my case) is 90% scan and bin. The web app isn't so awesome, mainly because of the lack of gestures.
Reminders added in Google Now show up in Inbox as well so I can be walking down the road and remember I need to do something tomorrow, and just add it to Google Now just by talking into my phone. 9 times out of ten I don't even have to spell correct the narrated text.
Inbox was the one single reason for me not dumping Gmail for Fastmail, which I was planning to do for privacy reasons.
I think machines still have some distance to go to achieve more usable guess-what-user-want. Many ideas have been tried, but I only see limited success in a few use cases.
I really like the Inbox app. It's email workflow directly matches how I've managed my email for the longest time. That said, it's missing one big important feature for a lot of us power users: a unified inbox.
I get a lot of email through the day and I need to get through it quickly. I also have 4 active email accounts. Having to constantly juggle the UI to switch between these accounts is a productivity killer and annoyance.
I get it, some people don't want and/or need the unified inbox and it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I'm not that person.
Dropbox's Mailbox app is a nice alternative (it's what I currently use). I feel the Inbox app is better constructed, but Mailbox has the features I need today and it works.
Actually even before this announcement it worked fine in Firefox - you just had to change your user agent (or install one of the numerous extensions).
Google said it was because it was "slow" under Firefox, but since I never noticed a bug or any slowness on my two year old Macbook Air, it looked more like they just wanted to push Chrome to me.
I completely agree. I'd guess at least 50% of my email is deleted immediately after reading and not because it's unwanted, but because it holds no long-term value. Inbox assumes that all email is better archived than deleted which is simply not the case.
When is it coming to the google apps? I recently switched my main email to the google apps and was excited for google inbox, but I still can not use it because it is disabled for us.
I really like inbox, but the lack of a prominent delete button annoys me to no end.
Yes, I know I can bundle up mail and then delete the batch - but I want a one click way of deleting a message that I know I will never read again (promo emails for example)
I tried Inbox, really tried to love it, eventually switched back. It's something about how it sorts or arranges your mail in non-chronological order that really messes with my way of finding things. Also only being able to see 7 emails on the screen is a huge issue - if I get 20+ emails, I'm not able to glance through all of them to get a sense of how much work I have to do that day. The end result is that I felt very uncomfortable and insecure using it, even though my brain told me that I loved it (because of the nice fast UI).
Tried Inbox for week and felt like it was introducing more clutter than less! Switched back to Mailbox and the Mailbox for Mac beta and have no complaints, I like the simple clean interface and functionality. Just wish they made a darker theme.
Inbox is amazing. However, at some point the Android app started constantly crashing (even while being in the background) and now I have it crash every 30 seconds and no clue what's going on. Anyone else seen similar behaviour?
Has anyone compared Inbox by Gmail with Mailbox by Dropbox? They seem to fill similar roles, and I've been happily using Mailbox for a few weeks, but I haven't seen a detailed comparison.
Can you activate the web interface without having an android/iPhone smartphone? "Download Inbox on your phone to activate your account before using Inbox on the web."
Wow, no reply yet points out that this is part of the whole effort to undermine one of our few open standards (email) and eventually turn everything into siloed walled-garden platforms.
Once Google Inbox is used widely, people will find it that much harder to use other e-mail systems.
I can't seem to find it now, but I read a wonderful article about how Facebook messaging and all sorts of other silos are about these platforms controlling everything and Google wishes they could have that same sort of control and push everything into their own proprietary messaging, although this fragmentation is obviously destructive for the internet and society overall.
I like inbox, on my phone. However, on a PC, I like the ability to use gmail's keyboard shortcuts etc. Inbox seems poorly designed for use as a desktop interface
I didn't have an issue with it because you could (and still can) email [email protected] and automatically get one.
If a software company wants to test a new product with a subsection of its users, freely available invitations are the fairest way because the users most interested in the product seek out the invitations. The alternative is to rollout by IP address or some other system that shuts out willing participants.
Perhaps a better system would be more like Blizzard's, which has you opt-in to all betas in your profile, then does a lottery among those users, but Blizzard uses its betas as marketing differently than Google and the products have completely different business models.
I don't think this is necessarily arbitrary. It's quite possible they estimated "Our servers can take N users right now and we'd rather do features than scaling while in a 'beta'". They might just need to scale-test before opening it up, and invites allow them to get user feedback without risking ungated floods which crash it all
Arbitrary hoops? All you have to do is request an invite. A couple days later I had the invite. I'm sure they are just limiting how many total user they have until it gets out of testing.
That almost bit me the first time. I think it may have changed a little at least though. I hit 'r' to reply and just tried it on a thread and noticed it only had the sender in the recipients field. Same if you click on the little reply icon to the right. The default if you click in the field does as labeled though, 'Reply to all'.
[+] [-] dimillian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedc|11 years ago|reply
I love it because I can only look at my pinned items and focus on knocking a few out at a time, and only occasionally flipping back to the regular inbox view. (Which I find distracting when I need to focus.)
[0] - http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2014/12/02/the-super-magic-p...
[+] [-] Mahn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikefonseca|11 years ago|reply
It doesn't sync with their previous star system, so you're unable to move back and forth on services when Inbox is buggy or vice versa. Inbox doesn't store any mail locally on mobile, so you're unable to search without an internet connection -- I am on the subway frequently and this is very problematic. With GMail, you have a one click delete system; with Inbox, you have two steps to permanently delete a message. This is cumbersome when you receive "a good amount of email", and you want to delete rather than archive.
It's a cleaner design, and the other features are nice incremental improvements, but the new features do not outweigh the benefits that the existing GMail app and service offers.
[+] [-] fluidcruft|11 years ago|reply
I often use gmail to send emails to my family and I just have a "Family" contact group setup in Gmail to do that (so in Gmail I just type "F" "a" "m" <tab> in the To: box and it's all setup). Most annoying aspect for me to using Gmail on Android and using Inbox in general, honestly.
Inbox is amazing for consuming incoming mail, and I'm hoping it will soon be able to consume Exchange.
I thought maybe +circles replaced that, but I can't even figure out how to send an email to a +circle.
Either I'm really dumb, or something obvious is missing.
[+] [-] lettergram|11 years ago|reply
I receive somewhere between 75 - 200 emails a day. I need to quickly scan over the email titles + bodies and just remove emails that are not necessary to respond to. Inbox doesn't really provide data as clearly. Though, if I wasn't receiving an email every few minutes Inbox does seem like a really awesome choice.
[+] [-] urda|11 years ago|reply
Plus, there's the huge risk that Google will kill this off in a year or so. Based on that history alone, all users should be reluctant to get on board with it.
[+] [-] hobo_mark|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakebasile|11 years ago|reply
I truly don't get the delay on both Inbox and Now - are the backend Gmail systems completely different? If it's just a worry that "enterprise won't like it," why not allow it to be turned on/off from the Admin console like so many other things?
[+] [-] CSDude|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moskie|11 years ago|reply
What I like about Priority Inbox is that it shows me important emails, regardless of the type ("type" meaning the different categories that Inbox has). I.e., I don't generally care about "Promos" or "Updates," but there are a select few within them that I do care about. Priority Inbox figures that out, and promotes those particular ones. Inbox just groups them all together, so to see the one "Update" that I care about, I'd have to sift through that whole category to see it.
Gmail occasionally tries to convince me to switch to Inbox. I hope it's not the case that we'll all eventually be forced to switch...
[+] [-] kyrra|11 years ago|reply
For me, Inbox solves my use-case for my personal email account. I never really put much time into organizing my gmail account to minimize noise, so Inbox was a good answer for me. Now, if Inbox was available for my work account I doubt I'd use it. I have carefully crafted lots of labels and filters to make Gmail an excellent solution for work, it just took more time to setup and maintain then what Inbox does for my personal email.
[+] [-] twoodfin|11 years ago|reply
Inbox with a "Priority" bundle would be perfect.
[+] [-] FreakyT|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullrouted|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junto|11 years ago|reply
I love the snooze and pin features. The Android app is awesome. Swip to archive is such a nice way to deal with email, which (in my case) is 90% scan and bin. The web app isn't so awesome, mainly because of the lack of gestures.
Reminders added in Google Now show up in Inbox as well so I can be walking down the road and remember I need to do something tomorrow, and just add it to Google Now just by talking into my phone. 9 times out of ten I don't even have to spell correct the narrated text.
Inbox was the one single reason for me not dumping Gmail for Fastmail, which I was planning to do for privacy reasons.
[+] [-] LiweiZ|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmurphy1976|11 years ago|reply
I get a lot of email through the day and I need to get through it quickly. I also have 4 active email accounts. Having to constantly juggle the UI to switch between these accounts is a productivity killer and annoyance.
I get it, some people don't want and/or need the unified inbox and it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I'm not that person.
Dropbox's Mailbox app is a nice alternative (it's what I currently use). I feel the Inbox app is better constructed, but Mailbox has the features I need today and it works.
[+] [-] bovermyer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloisius|11 years ago|reply
Google said it was because it was "slow" under Firefox, but since I never noticed a bug or any slowness on my two year old Macbook Air, it looked more like they just wanted to push Chrome to me.
[+] [-] buckbova|11 years ago|reply
I guess it's only one extra click for the trash. Google apparently wants you to save everything.
[+] [-] astrocat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssijak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wstrange|11 years ago|reply
Yes, I know I can bundle up mail and then delete the batch - but I want a one click way of deleting a message that I know I will never read again (promo emails for example)
[+] [-] rikkus|11 years ago|reply
I notice they haven't made these configurable yet - I was hard-wired to press d!
[+] [-] spyckie2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chambo622|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j2kun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riquito|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrangle|11 years ago|reply
Once Google Inbox is used widely, people will find it that much harder to use other e-mail systems.
I can't seem to find it now, but I read a wonderful article about how Facebook messaging and all sorts of other silos are about these platforms controlling everything and Google wishes they could have that same sort of control and push everything into their own proprietary messaging, although this fragmentation is obviously destructive for the internet and society overall.
[+] [-] vikramhaer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] multiplegeorges|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gegtik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 1123581321|11 years ago|reply
If a software company wants to test a new product with a subsection of its users, freely available invitations are the fairest way because the users most interested in the product seek out the invitations. The alternative is to rollout by IP address or some other system that shuts out willing participants.
Perhaps a better system would be more like Blizzard's, which has you opt-in to all betas in your profile, then does a lottery among those users, but Blizzard uses its betas as marketing differently than Google and the products have completely different business models.
[+] [-] TheDong|11 years ago|reply
I don't think this is necessarily arbitrary. It's quite possible they estimated "Our servers can take N users right now and we'd rather do features than scaling while in a 'beta'". They might just need to scale-test before opening it up, and invites allow them to get user feedback without risking ungated floods which crash it all
[+] [-] ArekDymalski|11 years ago|reply
Ingress haven't died yet.
[+] [-] M4v3R|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rs232|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pssdbt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mipapage|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _lce0|11 years ago|reply