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Comment by jcousins | Hacker News Reader

I will desperately miss the clean inbox paradigm when Inbox goes. I am struggling to go back to the old way of managing my email with no done button and poorly configured categories. I feel like I have to do it now or I won't adjust in time for Inbox being sunsetted early next year.

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I'm a bit curious, what features are missing?

The done button is the archive button in normal Gmail, and I think the new Gmail has the magical categories, although I don't use them.

If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.

> The done button is the archive button

True, but the point of Inbox was to treat your email like a todo list. By definition, it is the same, but training millions of Inbox users that this is new behavior makes it hard to grok.

> If you're using bundles, that's the one big feature that isn't ported, but it doesn't immidiately sound like you are.

Every Inbox is probably using bundles whether they remember or not. It becomes incredibly powerful when you have a trip coming up and your flight, hotel, rental car, etc. is all bundled up together.

The other feature I'm going to miss is reminders. Now I'll have to start emailing stuff to myself again, which is quite a few more steps.

(Unless of course I'm missing something, in which case I hope someone here corrects me.)

Recurring reminders. Can't do that with emailing stuff to yourself.

Gmail has smart reminders, or maybe I dont understand. I rely on gmail important filter. If I sent an email but there isn't a response back after like 4/5 days gmail puts a reminder into my important section. It's super helpful because I have a hard time remembering the smaller things.

I don't think that's what I'm looking for. I want to enter reminders that don't necessarily arise from an email. For example, if I'm asked in the morning to get some groceries, I'd set a reminder in Inbox about that that would arise at the end of my work day.

Now in Gmail, as far as I'm aware, I'd have to email that reminder to myself, and then snooze that email until the end of my workday.

I've been using https://www.followupthen.com/ for this sort of thing

Hmm, that looks nice, but not necessarily faster than snoozing an email I sent to myself when already in my email interface...

It should be (slightly) faster, since you don't need to interact with the email a second time -- instead of writing an email to yourself, write it to 5pm@fut.io and it'll get sent back to you at that time.

Ah, it can work that way as well? That is indeed slightly faster - I'll consider it if Gmail doesn't have Reminders by the time I'm forced to leave Inbox.

Had a look at the Tasks integration built into GMail now? Essentially the same as reminders. Add a due date and they function the same as reminders - across google calendar as well. On the phone there’s the Tasks app. Works pretty well IMHO, especially having the option to drag an email into a task.

Bundles for me. I get so much mailing list and advertising spam that my personal Gmail is almost unusable without bundles

Bundles is the big one. Whenever I log in to normal Gmail now instead of Inbox I immediately get put off and reminded I really need an alternative to Gmail that won't let Google mess with my email interface any more.

I recently made the transition and it wasn’t that bad. My brain adjusted to hitting archive instead of done. And the gmail app archives when you swipe right. The categories needed a little manual adjusting, but works good enough after the tweaking

You can actually even customize what the right and left swipes do. I have left for mark as read and right for archive.

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