Gmailify: The best of Gmail, without an gmail address

I cannot see myself ever using Inbox. I tried it and I just did not like it.

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.)

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.

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.

Gmail is a mail client, inbox is so much more.

I don't use it as the ability to only apply a single label to an email is a feature regression.

Chrome and Android will reach feature parity, but will always remain as separate entities due to branding.

Running Android on top of Windows just doesn't sound right, but it is what is effectively happening with Chrome supporting Android apps.

Go to the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/AdminHome).

Navigate to Apps > Additional Google Services

You'll see a gray bar at the top of the screen ("Filter: Top featured services"). Click the "X" on the top right to disable that filter.

Scroll down to "Web History" and select "On for everyone."

Each user may then need to also enable Web History for his or her own account (https://www.google.com/settings/accounthistory/search).

No, it shouldn't be that hard, but, yes, that will work.

How did you set it up?

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.

This can never go wrong.

No they aren't. You get no permissions by default. You have to do work to get any.

What's likely is Device Administration was added as a feature for exchange admins to remotely erase compromised/old/whatever phones.

It's depressing. I switched back from Chromium to Firefox and been getting tons of small issues like this...