Inbox changed my relationship with email and it is unbelievably frustrating to hear it is being shuttered. I was a better digital person because of the app: I never forgot to reply, I kept years of ideas and small notes in reminders, and I could quickly triage and clear all incoming mail.
These things in particular made Inbox stand out:
* UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.
* Bundles - especially for trips: all the relevant emails I needed, in one place—unbelievably useful while traveling. All tickets and information aggregated automatically (and if not, easily added manually).
* Reminders / Compose access - fast interface for creating small notes and mailing frequently contacted people. No reminders equivalent in Gmail (Tasks are available on Desktop but not mobile) and the mobile compose on Gmail is a blank email.
* Pinning - sticky a reminder or email for easy access and reference later. I guess gmail's equivalent is marking as important or moving to inbox?
In any event, if any of the Inbox team are reading this: big THANK YOU for creating a revolutionary product that was a joy to use. I already submitted feedback through the app wishing it would continue but if there is anything further I can do please share how!
Trips was the killer feature. I hope they port it. The ability to collect all my related information (a particular trip for example) into a single view was genius.
From a different perspective, Trips was surprisingly annoying for me! I had a team we're I'd need to approve other people's trips which would automatically show up as my own in calendar etc. This was especially annoying when our trips would overlap to the same destination. Unfortunately, it didn't have an easy way to mark what was my trip and what wasn't in any sort of repeatable fashion.
Alternatively, you can try Tripit[1] which has more features, but there is definitely more friction involved as you either need to grant access to your email account or manually forward emails.
Everything that tripit does, Kayak does too. I just email all my bookings to trips@kayak.com and it does the rest. (They offer direct email integration, but giving access to my inbox feels icky, and I wouldn't want other people's trip info to end up in my itinerary anyway)
I use TripIt a lot (manually forwarding emails). I don’t trust them with my email credentials. :-)
I do love the service. Their website design feels aged and worn, but the functionality is great. I love trying out confirmation emails from new travel services to see if they can parse them. And they usually do a good job.
Tripit is a fantastic service. One great thing about having my last 8 years of flight data logged there is that I can import it to do cool visualizations like: https://openflights.org/user/dankohn1
Click Analyze to see that I've flown 297 flights to 83 unique airports for a total of 539365 miles, which is 2.258x to the moon.
I've used Trips for years without Inbox. It's an app you can download on the app store/play store and it still automatically creates trips based on your Gmail inbox
you can use google trips app or search for label:trips in gmail client which have same list. but combination of these is basically the feature in inbox
I agree. I maintained a pretty clean inbox without 10s of rules. And as you said, never forgot to reply. I actually checked even my promo emails because I had them appear only once a day and I can delete them all in one click after reading them. Google keeps taking away the good products instead of figuring out how to get wider acceptance. Inbox definitely had a learning curve but it was worth it.
Dealing with promo emails is one thing I'll miss the most, especially pinning the 1 or 2 you might want to keep and then sweeping the rest with 1 click. On desktop gmail you can reproduce this functionality by starring messages you want to keep and then bulk selecting using the "unstarred" option.
The ios gmail app does not have any good answer to this, though. You have to select each email one by one and then delete/archive.
In the hope there is a google employee reading this, i want to shout a big plus one here! The next time the chance to look at the latest Microsoft offering comes up, I’ll do it, using vanilla gmail is just so clunky compared to inbox and i don’t want to go back to it.
The one thing I miss from Inbox is being able to see my Done/Archived emails in the order archived. (So I can see recently archived emails, even if they're old emails.)
For the first time ever, today I saw a message in Gmail that my email was snoozed.
Is it possible they are just incorporating these features into Gmail? That it was like a safe sandbox for working this stuff out before making at least some of it standard?
The Gmail client supports email snoozing including the ability to swipe to snooze. Under general settings swipe actions can be configured with Snooze being an option.
I concur, I don't know how I would have managed without it these last 4 years. Done instead of archive just makes so much more sense and it's the simple UI that really stands out as the best feature. Tried the new gmail just now and it's just not as good unfortunately, so much clutter. I'll be sticking with Inbox until the last day. What a shame.
The only Google product that I ever really liked from a usability perspective, and I get to heat they are killing it a month after I discovered it because I bought a new phone.
Never used Inbox after an initial look, mainly due to trust issues. How did this work? What if bundles missed an email related to a trip, did you then have to (1) know it went missing, and (2) find it from some hidden place and expend extra time? With these products I get the feeling that it may be amortizing rare occurrences over the most mundane usage.
Emails relating to a trip would get categorized into it automatically. You still had to pay attention. If an email wasn't detected as part of a trip, you dragged it over to the trip and then it was associated correctly.
Maybe it felt mundane to you but I found it extremely handy when landing in a new place, trying to rent a car, and get to my hotel. Just referencing the same little spot in the app was super helpful.
I also found the flight status information helpful. On our last trip, I found out our flight was delayed via Inbox an hour or two before I heard about it from United and was able to make necessary schedule adjustment with the updates.
So many people say trips was the killer feature - but for me, that was just cool. Snoozing emails to inbox zero. That was my entire system.
Do it now, or when am I most likely to be able to do it?
Cognitive load is a real problem, why would anyone want to see an email that they can do nothing about, above one they can deal with now - and if you just put it in a folder... you have to check that yourself. That's ridiculous. It should remind you - say I'm waiting on package tomorrow before I reply - I shouldn't see the email, or think about it until after the package comes tomorrow. I certainly shoudn't need to remember to look through a custom list, in order to see it.
Google literally revolutionised email, and are now deprecating it - when half the problem was that they rolled it out in a separate and confusing way... Please bring snoozing to Gmail ASAP or I will be so sad.
Snoozing of emails is a good start, although it seems that I cannot snooze "tasks" only set a date, and to snooze a note in Keep and then not see it (to reduce cognitive load to only things I can action now) - requires setting a reminder and then archiving the note...
I don't get why people want to be able to see everything all the time - or have to check in different places. Showing the notes as items in google inbox was fantastic, as was hiding them when they are snoozed.
Reminders also worked with hyperlinks and on Android you can share links with Inbox, saving it for later. Nifty feature and a great way of quickly transferring a link between multiple devices.
No they aren't. No automatic bundling of trips and purchases, no reminders (what happens to Inbox reminders?), and the UI is not as uncluttered and simple.
But, like all of their tasks in the past, those Tasks are in an entirely separate database. So as I see it, there are currently three Google taskesque databases:
- Classic Calendar tasks
- Reminders (Calendar, Inbox, Assistant)
- Tasks (Sidebar in Gmail, Calendar, and Docs)
Correct me if I'm wrong? They merge and create new task databases all the time it seems, so it's hard to keep straight.
The sidebar tasks is the same as the classic tasks, just a new view. If you they will appear on the old tasks interface and on calendar if you add a date.
> UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.
Lots of features are possible in the new gmail, but everything is nested in a menu! On the android app you swipe left or right to archive an email (instead of the inbox one way to snooze, one way to archive), and you actually have to open an email, and then click a sub-menu to snooze it!
Even adapting my workflow to the new tools, everything is nested - like you want a note in keep, or a task in tasks (and deciding between the two is not always obvious) - that requires you to go into a sub-menu / sidebar... the UX is so complex, it's really a struggle to be efficient so far.
If you want some of that back, look into a combination of Boomerang for Gmail (needs a browser extension) and Multiple Inboxes (in advanced tab of gmail settings)
I use Boomerang for all kinds of reminders. For me it works better than Inbox did and it was the reason why I went back to Gmail after trying Inbox for about a month.
I use a multiple inbox pane "is:starred" for pinning emails.
I never really "got" bundles. It was more of an annoyance to me and I prefer manual labeling.
These things in particular made Inbox stand out:
* UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.
* Bundles - especially for trips: all the relevant emails I needed, in one place—unbelievably useful while traveling. All tickets and information aggregated automatically (and if not, easily added manually).
* Reminders / Compose access - fast interface for creating small notes and mailing frequently contacted people. No reminders equivalent in Gmail (Tasks are available on Desktop but not mobile) and the mobile compose on Gmail is a blank email.
* Pinning - sticky a reminder or email for easy access and reference later. I guess gmail's equivalent is marking as important or moving to inbox?
In any event, if any of the Inbox team are reading this: big THANK YOU for creating a revolutionary product that was a joy to use. I already submitted feedback through the app wishing it would continue but if there is anything further I can do please share how!