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I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked with user config?

In Inbox I had a "Mailing List" bundle that had all my techy subscriptions and when I had free time I could see them. I could easily mark the entire bundle as read.

I'm tempted to start using one of my domains as my email address and point it at a different provider, but I'll see how Gmail fares over the next few months.

Oh God, the "updates" tab has eaten so many important emails. It won't trigger push notifications, and I don't always remember to check it when I open the page. I still don't understand what the category was supposed to be, but it's main purpose seemed to be to hide important (but automated) emails. I took the plunge and switched to protonmail w/ a custom domain. It's not perfect, and I'm looking at other options, but it's still far better than Gmail. I also moved from gsuite back to MS Office, since I have more faith in the continued stability and it isn't 100% reliant on cloud. Keeping a windows VM around is a definite annoyance, but switching away from Gmail was actually surprisingly easy. The old Gmail address is set to forward all, since I'm still updating accounts as I go, but 3 months in and no real problems. Plus, with email tied to my domain it's far easier to switch providers at this point, if I felt really ambitious I could even run it myself. Definitely worth the time invested.

Thanks for sharing. Good to see other people considering alternatives. I’ll start looking at the options.

> I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them.

Isn't this because it's a categorization they do using global information, like spam filtering? If so they would only be able to support the specific categories they are trained for across all users, so they couldn't support custom categories.

Inbox’s custom categories were created using simple filter rules. You can technically do that in GMail also, but only for folders, which are independent of the social/promotions/etc tabs. It seems to me that the ability to create custom tabs via filters would not be a particularly unreasonable feature.

Difference is, Inbox made filters automatically, and in gmail, you're stuck every single day modifying your filters to manually add yet-another-email address, and quite frankly, now that we know Google is perfectly capable of auto-maintaining filters, being forced to do it manually is insanely frustrating.

When combined with the fact that your address is being bought and sold like free candy, and the number of new addresses per week is over 10, it stops being a "you can do this" and starts being a "you must do these chores weekly to maintain any semblance of a useable gmail", I just call it broken. Gmail is broken.

Ideally, you should move more towards folders rather than these custom tabs anyways: The custom tabs don't work with other email clients, which just see one big inbox.

When I was on Gmail, third party client use led me to replace the tabs with custom rules to sort my social notifications, for instance, into proper standards-compliant actual folders.

That sounds a lot like what I do using 'labels'. Other than the position on the screen, what's the difference?

Inbox rollup: Set it up once, magically works forever

Gmail label: Create a filter for a label. It works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update the filter. Works only for that. New emails need to go in. Manually and annoyingly update...

You get the point. If I went and bought something from a new store and got it shipped, the receipt automatically appear in "purchases" in inbox. I didn't have to manually update a filter for this one new address. It just worked. Back on gmail, gmail treats that new email as if it has no idea what it is. So into the main box it goes until I manually create rules for this one specific case.

I shouldn't have to manually create a rule for every single email address that ever sends me an email. It's an astronomical amount of work. And now that we know that Google/Inbox was 100% capable of auto-filtering, the idea that we are being transported to the stone age of email is insanity.

Sorry, I was responding to,

> create custom tabs via filters

which as you say, labels are created by filters.

I have no idea how "Inbox rollups" work if they are different than that and than the tabs in gmail, since I haven't used it.

All of those labels can describe social media notifications. The chance you agree with someone else on what they are is under 50%. Promotions should probably just be 'spam' in any email client that works for you. This approach of positivist classification is simply boneheaded.

I don't really see how the four categories would help with training spam filters. "Social" is half spam, half maybe not. "Promotions" is mostly spam, though Google would rather see it as ham. "Updates" and "Forums" are mostly not spam.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.

Ironically, the Inbox rollups worked absolutely beautifully and the gmail filters are really, really rough and don't work well. "Updates" are so incredibly nebulous that it's really a 50/50 crapshoot on whether or not google knows what should go in there. "Updates" and "Social" are commonly mixed up, and finance/purchases have zero place to go. Are they 'Updates' like when I get a 'Our ToS has been updated' email? Etc. The categories are too general to be useful.

I venture that customization isn't important for 98% of users, especially less technically minded users. That's why Google consumer products are pretty simple. Moreover, at scale, every customization opportunity needs lots of work to support on every client and backend.

I think it's combination of:

* The person who pushed for the Inbox project got the promotion/raise they desired and move onto other new projects for further advancement.

* Inbox was too good at quickly managing email, and Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads than getting this done efficiently.

Call me cynical but that's where I'm at with Google at this point.

"Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads [...]".

What ads?

Gmail now contains ads within each of the "category" tabs. Ad blockers seem to mostly block them, so that's most likely why you haven't seen anything.

some ads are also disguised as emails, thankfully AdBlocks picked this up.

Gmail app on Android has ads in the mailbox.

And even more ridiculous, since they now have ads on the gmail app I get ads in my G suite account on android. They also constantly try to "unify" my email accounts so that they mix personal g suite email with my work exchange email and I have to click the top right to switch accounts.

I'm quite close to removing the whole damn app too and go for K9-mail or something again (does that still get updated?)

Also the web interface for gmail is absolute trash when you are using firefox, so is youtube creator studio beta. Even the "feedback" button is broken so I can't tell them it doesn't work.

I have no idea if K9-mail gets updated but we are talking about mail, what is there to update? It still works for me.

> Google would prefer you spend more time fighting the interface in Gmail and seeing ads

Do you see ads in Gmail?

I don't anymore and it feels it has been like since a very long time.

(and my AdBlock os turned off on Gmail)

I've started seeing ads disguised as emails (similar to promotional reddit "posts") in the "new" Gmail app I've switched to after being forced off Inbox. I think the ads only show up on free accounts. I have another Google account through my employer (for work email) and I don't see ads there.

My Gmail is free, too...

On GSuite (non-free version of Gmail) I don't see the ads either and it is supposed to be like that (after all, it's paid)

Inbox was a dream come true for the zero-inbox mentality. Sadly, I've yet to found a replacement for this tool.

Going back to Gmail, it is pretty baffling the features it is missing from inbox. Lacking bundles is bad, but having no equivalent to archive/mark all as read is terrible. I used to do a quick scroll through my junk to verify I didn't actually need anything, then click "archive all". Now I have to individually select each individual email to do a group archive/delete.

Heck, not just zero-inbox, but zero-todos. By being able to set reminders, I had a single point for all my own todos, and the ones sent to me by others (aka emails). Now they advice you to add a separate pane with Google Keep or Tasks, which means you're managing them separately. I also have no idea what will happen with the reminders I've set for later than today.

Even more so since my Google Keep reminders would show up in Inbox! Gmail doesn't do this afaik and it's frustrating.

I agree, but you can archive emails in gmail and it does the same thing as setting an email to done in inbox. You can still search for them in the search box or browse the all mail category.

The Inbox shutdown made me finally make the switch from Inbox/Gmail back to a mail program (Mailspring, but anything else could work), which is definitely good for me on the long term, as it means that switching to another provider will be completely seamless. I wonder if Google will ever learn that it can't teach users to like something they don't.

The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.

My experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.

When you've had a gmail account for ~15 years, every advertiser, info reseller, marketer, phisher and spammer alive has my email at the top of their list.

Is what it is, but with Inbox I had 0 issue controlling all of it, and with gmail, all of this garbage is dropped directly into my HIGHLY IMPORTANT >> INBOX with zero filtering or analysis (even though I have, no kidding, over a hundred manual filters containing THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of email addresses all of them "Mark as promotion / Never mark important / Skip the inbox / Never star / Archive immediately" and yet, every week, dozens more appear, so I add yet-another filter to the piles of hundreds, yet another dozen email addresses into the piles of thousands.

And yet with all of this work, I know my inbox will be a useless disaster by next week.

I have had mine for arouns 15 years and I do not recognize this. I really loved Inbox but for this aspect Gmail is not worse; I have not had to worry about spam, false positives or actual spam, at all for the past 8 years at least. I sometimes check my spam and it contains nothing I should have seen. Important contains what I want to see etc. It works perfectly; and I have been getting 1000s of mails per day, mostly spam for more than 10 years on many ancient email addresses that I still need to maintain.

It used to be the case, but apparently they can't sustain it without tightening the filters. In the past few months, the false positive rate went through the roof, and I don't trust their filters anymore.

To my mind, Gmail has always been broken because it utterly fails at being able to delete messages when acting as an IMAP backend.

On iOS, this problem has generally been solved, but on the Mac, it remains a clusterfuck. I have no hope it will ever be fixed.

While my primary account is still there, I moved my personal domain address to Fastmail.

I actually discovered recently Gmail has a setting for configuring this behavior over IMAP. But yes, countless times I discovered emails I had deleted on my Windows Phone just got archived silently. I wish their default was to behave like IMAP is supposed to, but my guess is they wanted to err on the side of not deleting data.

The settings exist, but at least on the Desktop (e.g, in a web browser), I have no confidence that the application will honor those selections.

The disappointing part of all this is I specifically remember when they fixed this in iOS 3 with one 'Archive' toggle switch that in combination with Google settings actually did what I wanted.

I'd be curious to know how G employees handle email inside the mothership given these constraints - do they fix it server side?

If you spend a week or so clicking the "unsubscribe" links in all of the unwanted emails you receive, you might be surprised with how manageable things become. I'd estimate that 99% of my unwanted emails respect the unsubscribe and don't send any more mail.

I highly recommend doing this. I got fed up at one point and started clicking unsubscribe in every non-personal or un-important email and, without all that much effort, my inbox became infinitely more manageable pretty quickly.

Yeah I also was sad about Inbox, it really solved all my problems. I loved it.

Now back in gmail and it sucks, it's just a cluster of emails with no way to filter thru without a lot of effort.

Specially the reminders and the automatic message bundling is terrible missing, the travel bundle feature were great as well.

What drives me crazy about it is that it is an awesome product, that I would probably pay a couple bucks if asked to but nothing can be done to save it.

I am at loss at how to migrate and where too.

I’m with you. I’m putting off switching away from Inbox until they kick me off.

Outlook for iOS is a pretty good app with most of the good from Inbox if you maintain near-zero inbox. I find myself using that almost all the time now because Gmail is so slow compared to it. I'd rather deal with a mobile keyboard than Gmail.

I host my email on my server for years. This is how email was designed. But unfortunately, most people tend to follow monopolistic, centralized services..

It is anecdata, but in my reasonably large group of acquaintances and fellow professionals (hundreds), I haven't heard this complaint in ages!

In any case, if you are having spam delivered to your inbox in GMail, it is very easy to train it to detect spam. Mark as many such as you can, and report them as spam. GMail learns very quickly.

The problem is the big gray zone between spam and letters from Mom. All those mailing lists you get on because you signed into their website or thought something looked interesting once, and they're more or less behaving themselves but still more noise than you're willing to deal with most days.

Inbox dealt with that category of mail, which is at least 90% of what I get, in a simply beautiful way that I can't replace. Gmail has clunky tabs with 90s style pagination and ads at the top.

I understand.

1. Does any other provider have better spam filtering than GMail, though? Curious.

2. You can configure inbox to show all the messages in Primary. Then, the tabs don't appear.

3. I don't see any ads. Probably because I pay for storage?