There aren’t many email clients that can claim as wide a market share as Gmail. What started as a 20% project at Google has blossomed well beyond what anyone could have expected, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Email, it turns out, is one of those things that a lot of people like to work exactly one way with as little change as possible.
For a company who is all about trying new things and creating new experiences, that’s a problem.The solution, at least for now, is an email client for Gmail called Inbox. It’s in beta for mobile devices and the web, and here’s what you can expect from the experience.
For the most part, Inbox is an email client with a heavy focus on Google’s Material Design. This means flat design with big buttons and animations everywhere. All of the basic parts of your email are still present, but things are a little more spread out and a lot more polished. The information density is on the low side — in fact you’re lucky if you get five whole emails on the screen at a time. What you get in exchange is a more glance-able setup, making it easier to choose what you want to do with that particular email. This plays nicely with the new tools Google has implemented in Inbox, which ultimately make it so you spend as little time inside any one email as possible.
What seemed at first like the ultimate procrastination tool is actually one of the best organization tools you can have. Snoozing an email allows you to hide that message based several different contextual elements. You can choose to make the email disappear for an hour, a day, or a specific date and time in the future.
You can even snooze the email until “someday” and have it randomly return to your inbox later.More interesting than snoozing by time, however, is the ability to snooze by location. You can be at home, snooze a bunch of emails for the office, and when you get to work the next day those messages will return as you pull into the parking lot. You can snooze with a quick swipe from the main screen, or from within the message itself, and it’s the kind of thing that makes heavy email users love third party apps like Mailbox by Dropbox.
If you have emails that need to be marked important, but you aren’t planning on keeping them around long enough to put them in a folder, pins are your new best friend. The pins system is similar in concept to the current stars system in Gmail, where you flag emails that are important and you go hunting for them later on. Pinning a message doesn’t change where that message is in the lineup unless you flip the pin switch at the top of the email client. This removes all of the other emails and sends all of your pinned emails floating to the top, making it easier to find emails that you deemed important. Unlike stars, pins are meant to be dealt with and discarded by the end of the day or week and then unpinned.
The big takeaway from Inbox so far is organization. You are given more sorting and flagging options on the leftmost panel, and you’re given the ability to set reminders and treat your emails like more than just a stack of digital messages. This is a service for people who want to view their emails as tasks, and want a set of tools that encourage that behavior. It’s not specifically for those who have embarked on the quest for Inbox Zero, but Inbox certainly makes that particular quest a lot easier to do on a day to day basis.
It’s a great setup so far, but it’s also not hard to see why Google didn’t just flip a switch and enable Inbox for every Gmail user. This is going to take some time to adjust to even for people who like shiny new things, and there are going to be plenty of people who reject Inbox at first just based on information density and the seemingly mobile-focused web client.
Inbox is also not a complete thought just yet, but it’s clear Google has had some great ideas for email and just lacked a good place to implement those changes without causing a panic.