So mixed messages again. Is 'Inbox' the next-gen Gmail interface or a hobby project that will get closed down in a year? Momentum has slowed and I've become so dependent on it's workflow I'd be gutted if this was the case. However - I don't believe Google will maintain two email clients in perpetuity.
On past experience - they'll fold the functionality of one into the other - partially and imperfectly leaving users irritated once more.
Still - it's not like I'd be safe from this anywhere else. Products from smaller companies are in constant danger of aquihire shutdowns or similar.
And open-source has still yet to produce UX that's much better than 'parity with the mainstream from a few years ago'.
I have the same fears but from the opposite end. I need gmail in my life, and cannot understand why anyone would want Inbox at all.
It shows my emails (fewer than in gmail) and combines it with a subpar task manager (in a world of subpar task managers) and wrecks on this "smart" categorization system which is just there for devious purposes and most importantly I cannot trust to do it's job properly.
I fear for gmail. I still hurt from google reader being removed. I would have paid £10 a month for google reader had they just asked.
Meh. I use Inbox, it's my default on all devices. It's pretty smart at filtering out social/ad crap, the search bar is more prominent and works very well, and it's got a nice, simple interface. It's different, but IMO far better.
I use Inbox on mobile and rarely load it in the browser. I spent a few months traveling the world last year and it generally did a great job keeping my travel related emails nicely categorized automatically.
Yup, I truly love this feature. Aside from categorizing, it will even displays all the infos like hotel check-in, train arrival, etc in a timely manner.
Agreed and, unfortunately I don't trust Google/Gmail anymore after their numerous service closing-downs. As long as the service does not seem to bring more profit through ads, they will close it, for sure.
I use GMail to fetch and filter my main account mails, I don't spread @gmail.com address much, keeping in mind that we will left with closed or transferred service. So I have a plan-B.
At least this is how I see as a long term user: they don't do evil, but removing good is also evilish.
Me too, and I'm still stinging from My Tracks being shutdown because it doesn't allow Google to monetize my fitness data (all the apps they recommended in the notice were social/cloud apps). Thankfully, I just the other day found a replacement app (Locus Map Pro).
I cannot see myself ever using Inbox. I tried it and I just did not like it.
Email is a task manager by default; you're kind of forced into it by the fact that people will send you emails that are "actionable" in some way or another. Adding metadata about those emails into some other task-management system would just be redundant. Inbox takes the more sensible approach: presenting the actionable stuff from your inbox as tasks, so you can manage them. Certain emails are tasks either way; Inbox just lets you deal with those using a UX that fits their task-ness.
Personally, I think it would make a lot more sense if there was a clearer separation: emails only showing up in Inbox or Gmail, but not both. Any email that Inbox thinks is/was an actionable "task" should be tagged by Inbox's algorithms as such, and this should hide it from Gmail's default views. Then, you scrub your Inbox for what people want of you—and check your Gmail every once in a while to see what's piled up, but otherwise generally don't worry about it. Gmail would then just contain your non-actionable emails: the stuff where seeing it would never give you an anxiety attack. (It'd still let you do bulk operations to all your messages including the actionable ones, though.)
I think that "messages AI-sorted into separate bins, and then viewed through separate apps, but all in one email database" is actually quite a flexible architecture, and could be taken even further. For one example: email newsletters are another thing that's discrete from regular email†, and has different viewing needs and associated verbs. You could have a Google Reader-like interface that was really just plucking all the newsletters out of your email and displaying them cleverly.
But do note that Gmail would still be there, and still be actively maintained, even if you managed to create fancy abstracted email viewer apps covering the complete gamut of emails people receive. There are many "generic email" tasks that right now only Gmail performs, that Inbox has no plans to add support for: creating filters, adding forwarding accounts, etc. Effectively, Gmail is the "file manager" for your email database, the thing that deals with the unabstracted objects and lets you do maintenance tasks. You can't really throw it away any more than you can throw your file manager away.
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† You know why Google Reader was killed? Because RSS engagement and opt-in and open-rates are much lower than the same metrics concerning email newsletters. Anyone who wanted to make money publishing some regular piece of content cared about these metrics, and so ended up pushing their content as an email newsletter, leaving RSS to be solely the province of amateur personal bloggers. So, more and more, the people with power at Google who cared about consuming content just got it in their email, and generally forgot that RSS was a thing.
(There's a whole rant I could go on here about the fact that RSS was intended to be a supplier-side microformat from the start—a way to ease the burden of syndication to encourage custom blogging software to expose syndicated data—and there was never intended to be such things as "RSS Readers", but rather a much more active ecosystem of plumbing—like, for example, gateways to consume and transform feeds into things like emails. Such plumbing was intended to be employed by the website author, in the same way they'd employ e.g. a reverse-proxy like CloudFlare. RSS was meant to be the internal protocol between the blog and such infrastructure software: like FCGI/WSGI is between web servers and application servers. Picture a world before webhooks, where web servers are dumb and you can't expect to be able to "dial out" a server-side request from your app's crappy VPS; picture the architecture you'd use to hook e.g. Mailgun up to your website in this world. That's RSS.)
No mixed messages here, Google has a penchant of making 2 of everything[1], and they can keep at it for years at a time. ChromeOS & Android, Google Maps and Google Earth (and Waze!), and so on. There is cross-pollination of ideas, and some products eventually coalesce.
> Is 'Inbox' the next-gen Gmail interface or a hobby project
I think the answer is 'neither', just like the iPad wasn't the next-gen MacBook. Inbox is just another email client that is certainly not for everyone, it holds a little too strongly to the inbox zero philosophy to be mainstream.
Having both Inbox and Gmail as separate products makes sense because at their core, Inbox and GMail are different beasts, I use both for different contexts. Inbox is great for organizing my personal email, GMail is great for work email. I wouldn't trust Inbox to properly organize my work email, and I don't have the energy to manually organize my personal email.
Has it really? I get update notifications literally every day, sometimes multiple times a day, so it seems like development is still very, very active.
> Is 'Inbox' the next-gen Gmail interface
I feel like Inbox and Gmail are separate long-term interfaces working on the same data set that serve completely different sets of users.
I got a toast notification in gmail that asked me to permanently redirect Gmail to Inbox. I believe that answered the questions for myself what direction that are heading.
Only if you've already used Inbox, correct? It's just a reminder to existing Inbox users. The reverse is not necessary since anyone using Inbox is already familiar with Gmail and using Inbox on purpose.
Remember when Google was toasting away to get everyone to use Hangouts for SMS? A few weeks ago, I got a toast in Hangouts asking me to use their new SMS-only Messenger app. You never know.
Can we kill SMS already? Seriously, what's wrong with e-mail? Everyone has data plans nowadays, if not data-only plans, and e-mail is cross-platform. Stop making me have to carry my phone around. I already have my SMS forwarding to my e-mail automatically, and now I'm just waiting for SMS to die.
I'm not sure about the US but in Canada it's certainly not true that everyone has data plans (in fact as far as I can tell unless you have a company sponsored phone, data plans are in the minority), and SMS remains a cheap communication method that is more or less guaranteed to work.
I live in Canada, and I don't know anyone who lives here that doesn't have a data plan of some kind, although I'm sure they definitely do exist and there are definitely people without a ton of data.
Really? I don't know many university students that don't have the latest smartphone(or at least a fairly recent one) which usually implies they have a data plan of some kind since most of them don't have $800+ to pay outright.
But to be fair at my university there are also a lot of students that drive brand new or fairly new cars too and I've parked beside too many Porsches the student parking lot.
It's a good idea to have two separate channels. SMS will also work when you're in another country without a data plan. Every phone has SMS. The OTT instant messaging solutions are fragmented (I wish all my contacts had Signal!)
And e-mail will work when you don't even have a cell phone. I don't like the idea that I need to carry a phone around everywhere I go. If I happen to be carrying a laptop around with me, I want that laptop, as a more powerful device, to replace my phone, not require me to walk around with 2 devices which is cumbersome, theft-prone, and simply downright inconvenient to have your eyes glancing between 2 screens all the time. Everything else -- Facebook, Gmail, Skype, everything else -- can be accessed with that laptop. Information flows with me, independent of device. I show up in front of any screen that I own, authenticate myself with a password, and everything I need shows up on that screen, loaded from the cloud. I move between rooms, between offices, carrying nothing, and continue replying to my Facebook chats and e-mails that I started in the previous location. I don't need to carry anything with me. SMS, WhatsApp, and WeChat don't flow like that, which is why I hate them with a passion.
Plus, data plans are available everywhere now. For the most part, I use only data. Also, SMS doesn't work when you have to keep switching SIM cards and phone numbers. I can't login to half of my accounts that want to do SMS verification because I registered those accounts using a different SIM card in a different country; I have to wait till I return to those countries before I can login to those accounts and do something about them.
E-mail doesn't have this issue. I've had one e-mail address that has been associated with me for 15+ years that has worked 24/7 internationally. Phone numbers have to practically change every time you step across a country border. Phone numbers are a horrible way to identify me, at least.
* It doesn't show full messages on Android Wear devices. You know, Google's own product. Gmail does.
* I can't figure out how to set up a filter in Inbox. The settings page is incomplete. I still have to go back to Gmail to change settings. So I might as well just use Gmail.
* The pins in Inbox don't sync up with the stars in Gmail. Pins, stars, tabs, automatic Gmail categories, automatic Inbox categories, seriously, can we just have one system?
> I can't figure out how to set up a filter in Inbox.
> The settings page is incomplete.
I'm a huge fan of Inbox, but this still gets me all the time. Inbox was pushed as a kind of advanced application to advanced users, yet I have to go back to Gmail for any kind of advanced settings or configuration. That makes absolutely no sense at all.
Yeah, exactly. If Inbox's feature set were complete, I'd probably switch to it. It does have some nice features, including better icons and action buttons for package tracking and such. I just don't want to have to simultaneously deal with 2 websites/apps to access e-mail.
If it were still in alpha, i.e. "what do you think of this idea", I would understand that some things are missing and gladly provide my feedback about the concept. But once the concept is verified and being pushed as a kind of "ready for consumer use" beta, it really needs to be complete in features before I would make the switch for real life usage. Especially for a mission-critical product coming from a large company with enough developers.
Judging from the fact that Google automatically redirects gmail.com to inbox.google.com once you've visited inbox, I'd guess they view it as the next-gen Gmail interface.
If folks are looking for an open source alternative to this, you should consider N1 and the Nylas sync engine.
With N1, you can run the entire stack yourself, or use our hosted version. Plus, N1 is built to be extended by developers using JavaScript, so you can build anything you want into it.
That really looks sweet! But glancing over the FAQ, it's not clear to me if it doesn't do IMAP&SMTP with the big players, or if it doesn't feature IMAP&SMTP at all?
N1 supports connecting to all the major email providers, as well as pretty much every obscure IMAP server run by your ISP! What's pointed out in the FAQ is just that it uses a cloud service component (also open source! http://github.com/nylas/sync-engine) that we developed first to make it easier to build clients.
When you say authentication, do you mean the cloud engine doesn't authenticate against your email providers, or that the desktop client doesn't authenticate against the cloud engine?
Does linking another e-mail to my Gmail mean that Google will go harvest all of the e-mails from the Inbox of that account in order to deliver targeted ads?
I ask because I don't want to link my 15 year-old Hotmail account to it if that's the case. I'll just stay with the web client.
I've switched to Google Inbox rather than Gmail but I'd still be happier with Gmail than any other webmail - and nearly any desktop mail client (although I've seen a few glimpses of next-gen clients that have the potential to change my mind).
How would you justify that it's 'dreadful'? Am I just deluded?
I'm talking about the web interface. Have to click a button for cc, have to click a (hidden) button to change the subject matter, it's incredibly easy to not notice attachments, the threading I kinda just don't get, having to click "more" to see the link for spam, I could go on and on but that gives you some ideas.
It's an email client, so they have a hard time fitting parallax and scroll-jacking in to it. This leaves something to be desired for more frontend minded folks from the 2010's methinks.
"Gmailify : The best of Gmail, without an gmail address" because for Google doesn't matter if you use @gmail or not. What matters is the permission to read your inbox and harvest your messages. Please prove me I'm wrong.
Well...and sort out those pesky newsletters that you signed up for so they can starting charging senders to hit your main inbox. Just waiting for it...
it's astounding that they still haven't bridged the UX gap for users w/ Google Apps accounts all these years later.
Nowadays, with the more enterprise-y features (policy, etc.) of the {Gmail,Apps} for Work, I at least get _why_ they're not on parity. But if you asked me 5 years ago, I would have never guessed this (Apps users missing out on XYZ) would still be a thing.
I've heard this before, and as far as I can tell it isn't true. There is an option buried in Device Management that claims to turn on Google Now for Android users but the service it enables is a subset of the full capability of the product. Namely, you get no cards based off of your email inbox. No flight notifications, package tracking, and similar things.
They already had this, only without the server-side processing for Spam filters and Google Now features. The Gmail app in Android has had the ability to bring in other email accounts for months; This seems like the next logical step. Super cool option to have.
I wonder if those of us who already have third-party email accounts in the Gmail app will be automatically upgraded to this.
Indeed. The Gmail app itself has been able to act as an IMAP client before, but (as it's purely client side) this mode doesn't offer all Gmail features and is quite battery and bandwidth intensive as IMAP wasn't really designed for mobile devices. With Gmailify, the IMAP synchronization happens on Google servers, which also do normal spam detection and categorization, and the phone accesses the data like any normal Gmail account.
Or they've just whitelisted said providers after having either verified that providers IMAP implementations comply with IMAP standards, or they've whitelisted said providers because those providers were big enough that it was worth the trouble for Google to work around issues with those providers IMAP implementations.
I think it's kind of demonstrative of where Google's at with privacy now, that they don't see fit to mention the practical reality that this involves Google indexing and data mining all of your email from another provider. Many of us can make that common sense leap, but in the past Google respected your privacy at least to mention it outright.
I just want to add that you can email forward your domains (for example included free in namecheap domains) and use mailgun to send from them all within Gmail/Inbox. That way you can manage multiple different domains at one place comfortably. (And like the main argument in the article get the superb spam filter)
One of my aunt uses a yahoo mail account that I periodically maintain for her. It's unbelievable how much spam makes it through their filters. I'm talking about stuff that ends up in your inbox, not your spam folder. I'm looking forward to gmailifying it for her.
Seems pretty straight forward - pretend you signed up for a Google account and also had that account connect to your other email addresses (Like people have been doing for years, and arguably one of gmail's best features)
Now just rebrand it without the visible requirement of having a Google Account. I wouldn't be surprised if you're still getting a Google account in the process, it's just not advertised.
When you go through the sign up flow you can select whether you want to Gmailify your address into an existing or a new Google account. We make it very explicit that all your mails are being copied into Google servers.
By the way, while Gmail always has offered ways to just "import" your messages from a third party address, with Gmailify you get a full two way sync, so you can e.g. keep using the Yahoo UI and your changes will show up in Gmail.
I do not seem to have the option to gmailify my address. Is the feature restricted to specific providers? If yes, are there any plans to support Office365 addresses?
After reading this I tried to install an exchange account on my gmail app. It asked for a bunch of extra permissions for the specific exchange account, including the permission to "Erase all data" from the telephone, resetting it to factory settings. Not gonna happen.
From what I gather those permissions were requested by the exchange server, so my university would be the one to blame. Why a server would ask for this permission is beyond me.
"Exchange" (or, specifically, Exchange ActiveSync) is a euphemism; it sounds like a push email service, but it's actually Microsoft's Mobile Device Management[1] service which happens to, among other things, push-sync emails to the devices managed by it. It often gets set up by clueless admins (of universities, say) when what they really want is just plain IMAP.
I had these at work, so i never linked my phone to exchange. (Its definitly exchange). Our admins were not very competent but appearantly that is the default behaviour.
If you are still searching on a solution on this: I were able to solve the permission problem on Android with Mailwise. Apart from the cool exchange feature, it's a fairly average client though.
That delay you talking about depend on how often you get new mail on particular account as gmail trying to not check account every minute if it's only get mail once a week. Though delay can be really low if you get new mail every few minutes.
And you can artificially decrease it by setting simple script that would send some random mail to that account and then just filter it on gmail-side.
I would guess it is using Push-IMAP to communicate with Yahoo Mail, Outlook/Hotmail etc. That's why they have only implemented it on mobile devices and not the Gmail web experience - because it's a client to server fetch model.
I still don't quite understand what's great about Gmail. Everyone goes on and on about how amazing it is, and I'm sitting here having to refresh the page every 5 mins because it won't update, or it's lost a toolbar button.
Inbox is worse for me (although I realise probably not for most) because automated emails are usually really important for me as they are telling me something stopped working, but emails from people might not be that important because I get hundreds a day.
Between the issues with the Gmail web client, and the problems I have with Inbox, the whole "Gmail" product is one of the worst products that I have to use, and I try to distance myself from it with good email clients as much as I can.
Not only that but there's a bug between Gmail and Firefox that causes gmail to freeze on "Loading ..." after a while and not update anymore. I believe that's what GP is referring to and it is infuriating.
It's depressing. I switched back from Chromium to Firefox and been getting tons of small issues like this...
Its not working for me on my own hosted email. There is no "gmailify" option. Am I missing something or does gmailify ONLY work for hosted-non gmail accounts e.g. Yahoo, Outlook etc. ?
"Gmailify links your existing account to Gmail" -- okaaay. At least it's stated clearly in this case. The whole merge-with-Google thing (which they've also been known to do as opt-out, albeit not in this particular case) is exactly the reason why I'm avoiding a lot of Google's services, and why I respect (and trust) Microsoft more in recent years. It just saddens me that Outlook for Android is so bad in some things, it's basically unusable (e.g. you can't follow links from emails).
Although, if activating this feature doesn't explicitly warn you that they're merging your account(s) with a Google/Gmail account, then it's worse than an opt-out.
On past experience - they'll fold the functionality of one into the other - partially and imperfectly leaving users irritated once more.
Still - it's not like I'd be safe from this anywhere else. Products from smaller companies are in constant danger of aquihire shutdowns or similar.
And open-source has still yet to produce UX that's much better than 'parity with the mainstream from a few years ago'.