Inbox by Gmail has been around for almost two years, and while it continues to exist alongside Gmail, it’s easy to see that Google engineers see Inbox as the email app of the future. New features are being added on a regular basis, and with each one, it’s slowly becoming smarter and easier to use. Here are five reasons you should consider switching to Inbox right now.
1) Smart apps in your email
Recently added features bring Trello and GitHub integration to Inbox, which it can parse information inside messages sent from those services and give you automatic alerts rather than a standard ‘new email’ update.
It works in the same way that Inbox scans hotel bookings for key details. It works with things like Google Alerts and Google Drive too, so you can finally insert Drive links directly into emails and skip the step of adding the file as an attachment.
The list of supported services is fairly sparse right now, but it’s easy to see how Google could expand type of integration, making more of your email updates smart, so you get the key information at a glance.
2) Get through newsletters in a snap
Email newsletters are back in fashion (we have one) and Inbox deals with them in a clever way, parsing the links inside to give you a quick summary. You can tap on one or more of the links or just ignore them completely.
You can still open the whole newsletter if you want more information, but this is another prime example of Inbox making it easier to get through lots of email.
Once you’re done with a particular newsletter, it’s minimized in the email list to take up less space. As with anything else in the Inbox app, you can swipe on a newsletter to archive or snooze it.
3) Make your replies smarter
One key feature Inbox has that Gmail doesn’t is smart replies. Quick, AI-powered responses to your contacts to help you power through your inbox and spend less time composing replies.
Open up any thread you’re planning to respond to, and you’ll see the generated quick replies appear in blue boxes at the foot of the screen. Google engineers recently added emoji to the list of possible replies too.
You still have the option to reply like a normal human being if you want, and the feature is now available on the web as well as mobile.
4) Catch up on your reading and to dos
You can use Gmail as a read-it-later service and to do list, but Inbox is geared up more specifically for these type oftasks. Online articles can be saved to Inbox on Android or iOS, provided Inbox is installed, and on the web through an official Chrome extension.
Meanwhile the ability to add reminders is right next to the option to compose a new email (use the large red plus icon on mobile or the web). To dos can be associated with a time and even a place.
The reminders sync neatly to Google Now too, so you can access them without having to go into Inbox each time.
5) Take control of your snoozing
The ability to snooze emails isn’t available in Gmail, and the option in Inbox has been getting more and more advanced over time. If the app detects a date and time in the email you’re snoozing, for example, that comes up as a snooze suggestion.
It works for package tracking, hotel and flight reservations, invites from Google Calendar and more, letting you forget about an email until you really need it.
What’s more, you can customise snooze times and days for morning, afternoon and evening through the app settings.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo
Comments
9 responses to “Why Inbox Is The Future Of Gmail”
So I guess this is great if I want google to know absolutely everything about the emails I send and receive.
Convenient!
It doesn’t really work like that.
Theoretically that’s true if the services that facilitate this functionality aren’t storing any metadata about your emails in order to work. Smart replies seems like it’s a feature that can potentially store data to determine what a common response would be. App integration seems like another potential area for the service to know too much about your emails as well.
Unless you’re an engineer on the Inbox team or someone aware of the API you can’t really be certain what is and isn’t being stored and monitored by a service that inspects and parses your emails for relevant information.
I haven’t actively used the smart reply feature, yet the options it suggests mostly seem reasonable and don’t seem to be worded the way I would usually pick by default. So it seems likely that the suggestions aren’t necessarily tailored to me.
Given what we know Google has been researching, my guess is that they put together a set of common replies, got some humans to sort through a corpus of email picking reasonable replies for each and then used this data to train a neural network. They also almost definitely feed which smart reply suggestions users actually pick as additional training for the neural network.
I guess there is a question of whether they’re training a neural network for individual users or having a single net used by everyone. I’m not really sure it matters from a privacy stand point, given the way it is used.
It still doesn’t nest labels like in gmail, and still makes emails disappear in gmail if you don’t set a label on them.
I tried using Inbox for about a minute before I realised that it deleted emails in Gmail the moment you read them.
How is that a feature even worth considering putting into anything?! The email it deleted was nothing important, but what if it was? Why would anybody ever use Inbox?
Are you sure it deleted them as opposed to archiving them? (which should show up in regular GMail’s “All Mail” view).
Yeah it archives them without a label, which means they’re hard to find without using key word searching.
I’ve been using Inbox for the better part of a year now, not sure if it has deleted any old emails out if gmail but I’ve been able to search for things that happened months ago and still find them