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I've been using Google's Inbox as a full-time replacement for Gmail for nearly a month now. Representing a dramatic rethink of how mainstream users can manage their daily deluge of email, Inbox is a big departure in both form and function from Google's regular email app. It works on iOS and Android devices as well as any computer using the Chrome browser. Is it the answer to your email woes? Here's a look at what the Inbox team has gotten right, and wrong in its quest to build a better email app .
When Google announced the public beta for Inbox last month, two things were made clear from the outset: Inbox is very much in beta development, with a feature set that is far from complete. And Gmail is not going away anytime soon.
Google is developing Inbox in parallel with Gmail. By making Inbox available on an invitation-only basis, Google has effectively limited its release to motivated early adopters and tech journalists. This is a smart move, allowing the Inbox team the freedom to try (and fail) without causing a revolt among existing Gmail users, because Inbox is a completely different animal, based on a different concept of how we manage our digital lives.
A steep learning curve
Like nearly everyone else who's written about Inbox, I spent the first few hours...OK days, in a state of near-constant frustration. Email apps have never been very complicated. You see a new message and read it, archive it or delete it. In my initial forays with Inbox, doing anything other than reading or replying required a trip to the help guide. With Inbox's icon-driven interface, the most prominently displayed options are for pinning, snoozing or marking an email as done (more about those functions in a moment). The problem is you'd be hard pressed to know what those icons actually do just by looking at them. And the delete button? In Google's information-harvesting worldview, throwing away data is like bearhugging the Queen. Accordingly, the trash icon is buried in a submenu. Deleting an email on either the mobile or desktop app requires at least two clicks/taps. And while Inbox conveniently groups emails under "Today", "Yesterday" and monthly headings, if you want to see the actual time that the latest email in the thread was sent, you must click on the message first.
Pin, Snooze or Done
In Gmail, I tend to target important emails either by starring them if they have information I'm going to need later or marking them as unread if they require a response before the end of the day. Inbox greatly improves on my admittedly imperfect system by letting you pin an email for easy access in the future, snooze an email so that it reappears at the top of your inbox at a time of your choosing, or mark it as done. This last action works like the archive feature in Gmail. The thread isn't deleted, it's just moved out of your inbox, keeping clutter to a minimum.
Pinned emails, on the other hand, stay in your inbox so they're always visible. And they can be displayed all together by clicking or tapping the Pin filter at the top of the screen. You can use this Pin-only view as a top priority list of your emails. The snooze feature will be familiar to users of specialized mail apps like Mailbox. With it you can temporarily remove the email from your inbox, setting a specific date and time for it to reappear. And if you've got location services enabled on your phone, you can have Inbox resurface the email once you have reached a specific destination, like your home or office, for example.
Marking an email as Done sends it off to that great email purgatory we know in Gmail as Archives. There is a sweep component to the Done action, that lets you batch apply the option to all emails from the same day or month. If you've managed to get to all of your emails sent on Monday for example, you can set them all as Done with a single click or tap.
Bundle up
Inbox helps reduce the visual clutter in your inbox by automatically bundling emails of related content in their own categories which remain collapsed until you click or tap them. The collection of default bundles group content like car and airline reservations, online purchases, bank and credit card emails, forum lists, and correspondence from retailers. There's even a Low Priority bundle for emails that Google's algorithms deem you're less likely to read, such as store sales and social media updates. You can add your own custom bundles. And Inbox also imports the email filters you've already created in Gmail as bundles.
Reminders
Although you can't yet add Google Calendar events from Inbox, the app does offer the ability to create reminders for tasks that you need do at a specific date and time. Reminders will appear at the top of your inbox at the scheduled time. Much like a calendar event, you can set recurring reminders on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. You can set a custom schedule as well.
Yeas and nays in daily use
In day-to-day use, Inbox has some rough edges but offers some truly useful features as well. Once I finally broke down and read Google's online help guide section by section, I was able to use Inbox much more efficiently on my phone and desktop. There's definitely a learning curve that needs to be reduced.
I mentioned this at the outset, but it bears repeating if you're thinking of giving Inbox a try. You can only add Gmail accounts to the Inbox app. While this restriction is understandable in an early public beta, a more curious limitation is that no signatures are included in your sent emails. On more than one occasion I've had to separately email contact info that would have shown up in my signature had I been using Gmail. And in outgoing emails where I've manually typed in my name and address for shipping purposes, that information is automatically set as quoted text, hidden below the ellipsis.
While Google may believe that Inbox's stellar organizational abilities make deleting emails a thing of the past, I take great satisfaction in sending emails to the trash. One of my biggest gripes with Inbox is the extra steps you have to take to delete an email. A one-click solution, like Inbox offers with pinning, snoozing and marking as done is sorely needed.
Another frustration is that the process for deleting multiple emails is maddeningly inconsistent. If you're viewing a bundle in your inbox, you can select Move all to Trash from the submenu. But if you call up that same bundle from the main menu this option is unavailable. In this case you must select each email individually (tedious) by clicking/tapping on the sender icon (far from obvious) before you get a batch delete option. The same goes for any non-bundled emails in your inbox.
While the Inbox team is to be commended for maintaining uniformity between the desktop and mobile experience, it's clear that the design emphasis is on mobile devices. On my desktop monitor there's simply too much wasted space in the browser window, which presents a single column scrolling interface.
Having said all of that, there are Inbox features I now can't do without. The snooze option is fantastic and has saved several non-urgent emails from getting lost in inbox purgatory. Since I work from a home office, I find it more useful to have the snoozed email reappear at a specific date and time, rather than location. But the few times I've gotten an email while out running errands and have set it to snooze until I arrive back home, the feature has worked perfectly.
While I'm hoping that Inbox soon gets direct integration with Google's Calendar, the reminders do offer a good alternative for tasks like returning calls and checking in with my editors. You can even attach a reminder to a specific email with a description that saves you the step of having to open the email to find out what needs to be done.
The search tool gets a helpful makeover. In Gmail, when you type a search term, the results appear as truncated subjects lines in a small pull-down window. With Inbox, Google's search-as-you-type results are displayed as actual emails, in a scrollable list using the full width of the interface. You can visually scan through several emails containing the search term and easily find the one you're looking for.
The way Inbox displays information for its Travel and Purchases bundles is very clever. When Inbox finds an email for a plane reservation for example, it creates a thumbnail photo of your destination city alongside your airline, flight number and travel time so you have the most crucial bits of information without needing to open the email. For movie and concert tickets the Purchases bundle displays a Google Maps thumbnail of the venue's location along with the time printed on the ticket. Again, a nice timesaver.
In nearly a month of use, I've found Inbox to be impressively accurate when it comes to organizing emails into their appropriate bundles. Mistakes have been very rare. And one of the best features of an Inbox bundle is the option to have it appear in the inbox whenever a grouped message arrives or on a set daily or weekly basis instead. Not wanting to be constantly distracted by emails from retailers, for example, I set my Promos bundle to arrive in my inbox only on Monday mornings, when I can quickly scan them all at once and either delete or mark as done, the entire batch. The great benefit here is that my inbox doesn't get continually cluttered with these messages, most of which I never respond to in the first place. On one occasion this once-a-week viewing approach did cause me to miss a time-sensitive email. But that's a price I'm willing to pay for a clean inbox.
So, will Inbox replace my Gmail app? There is still clearly some work to be done in this public beta. The app will have to become much easier to understand for new users. And I'll need to be able to add my non-Gmail accounts before I can drop Gmail altogether. But when it comes down to it, Inbox gets a whole lot right and delivers on the promise to reduce the clutter from my inbox, with a minimum of user configuration. And that's really all the motivation I need to make the switch.
Are you using Inbox? Let us know what think about it in the comments section below. And if you'd like to give Inbox a try, let me know. I've got a few invites left and will give them out to readers on a first-come first-serve basis.
