There are some that would have us believe that email is passé and is due an overhaul, if not a replacement, and perhaps to some extent they might be right. But for those who live in their virtual inboxes, that isn’t even an option, Luckily for them, Google, whose business happens to be beholden to email, is a staunch ally. It has come up with a new app simply called Inbox that turns the age old email into something more dynamic, more personal, and even more productive.
There are four crucial features of Inbox, the first two of which might be familiar to the more dedicated users of Gmail. Bundles builds up on the labels and categories that Gmail already has implemented. In a nutshell, it automatically groups emails into sorting bins so that you don’t get immediately overloaded by your massive Inbox list. A few pre-made bundles are available from the get go, but you are completely free to create your own and to move emails in and out of bundles. To help you even better weed out the important emails, Inbox offers Highlights, which puts the most important or urgent emails front and center. Inbox even offers additional information scoured from the web that are related to that critical email, like flight and delivery schedules.
Some people have turned their inboxes into something more than just for emails, lumping even todo items and reminders in there as well. While some productivity gurus might frown on that practice, Inbox tries to accommodate everyone’s workflows. If you want to add such items in your inbox, there’s a dedicated action for that as well. To go with that feature, Inbox allows you to snooze your emails, and todos, temporarily banishing them from your inbox until an appropriate time, a popular feature based on feedback from apps like Boomerang or Mailbox from Dropbox. Somewhat related to this, you can pin emails and todos in your Inbox so that they remain visible even after you’ve cleared your Inbox, akin to archiving mail in Gmail.
Inbox doesn’t supplant Gmail and in fact works only with Gmail accounts, hopefully something that Google will eventually open up to others. It is currently invite only though Google hasn’t given a clue when it will be available to the public. Inbox by Gmail doesn’t exactly revolutionize email as we know it, which is probably just fine for many email users. It does, however, give a new way to get those emails under control and keep them from running, and ruining, our lives.
SOURCE: Google
Meh