My new Inbox

I got my Inbox invite today (Gmail’s new format for email, for those who haven’t been waiting for their chance to check it out).

First of all, no, sorry, I can’t see how to issue an invite. But the good news for those who want in is that I just requested an invite on the site, and it came quickly, so sign up yourself!

In the meantime, my brief review: I was excited to try it, and the interface is pretty, but feature-wise, I’m underwhelmed. It basically pre-labels your email into its own categories (Promos, Forums, Updates, Social, Finance), which are not necessarily the categories I’d use (what’s Forums? And why are AMA and JAMA in updates, but Dana-Farber and AMIA in Forums?), so that’s just filters. It then groups them together so that you can view similar messages and handle them together. That is nice and probably more efficient (even more efficient would be to just check email less often each day), but it’s not revolutionary.

A message can be pinned, meaning it will stay in the inbox and not be archived when you sweep everything away. Thus the mindset is to help you clear out your inbox each day, just saving pinned things, rather than most people’s default of just leaving everything in the inbox. Still, it’s a cosmetic difference: some people use read/unread for this, or starred/unstarred. Of course, changing the default is likely to make more people archive the messages they don’t need, but I’m quite good about archiving messages I’m done with, so everything in my Gmail inbox is new or a to-do (“pinned,” in the new lingo), so this doesn’t add much for me.

There’s also the option to add to-do items to the inbox. This makes sense as many people use their email as a todo list. Still, without the fancy features of a real todo program, most people will still need something else for lists that need priorities and tags and other kinds of organization.

Lastly, there is the new option to swipe a message to have it return later to your inbox. This is the greatest and only really new feature. For those who haven’t used it before, the idea is that it keeps you from rereading and reconsidering messages you can’t manage yet, while ensuring they don’t get lost before you need them. But many have used such a feature before: Boomerang does this nicely, though it doesn’t work well on the mobile format, and they limit you to a certain number of deferred messages unless you subscribe. Mailbox does this exceptionally well on mobile, and I’ve been using it as my main iPhone mail program for a while. They recently came out with a desktop version which I haven’t fully adoption since it doesn’t quite integrate with Gmail enough. But now Gmail seems to be stealing their main feature, and I feel guilty whenever the big guy takes the creative idea from the smaller one. I guess Mailbox isn’t suffering—Dropbox bought them, so they’re okay—but there’s a pride in not being purely inside a single provider camp, a la Farhad Manjoo’s advice to “Buy Apple’s hardware, use Google’s services, and buy Amazon’s media,” which is what I already do. I’m not ready to give up Mailbox yet (I’m still nervous about managing my mail in Inbox, since an X in Inbox just closes the message, while on Mailbox the X deletes it), but Inbox might manage to convince those people who use their inbox as a todo list and who have a lot of mail from going elsewhere to manage it; it might keep them in a pure Google world.