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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I really miss Google Inbox, for the tasks feature (that was never brought over to GMail as promised when it was discontinued). It had a great implementation of a postponing feature. I liked having tasks as inbox items just like emails, as emails usually also represent tasks, so having them in the same place was perfect. I'm likely to ignore any other task app, but I always check my email, so I'd always see the postponed tasks when they came back around.

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Have you tried Starred Inbox? That turned me from "person who often slips on requests" to "person who rarely ever slips on requests".

Basically, keep your inbox as zero unread. If something should be dealt with it immediately, deal with it immediately. If it needs to wait, Star it. Now, your inbox has a list of all Starred messages at the top. At the start and end of work day, work through Starred items to either tackle them, or keep them Starred for later. But whenever you open your inbox, the starred items are at the top.

With inbox you could have multiple bundles, instead of one "starred" section, and each bundle could have a policy so that after you finished triaging it would automatically be hidden for a day or a week, so that it wouldn't constantly distract you by appearing at the top every time you glance at your inbox. This feature was also never ported to Gmail.

> I really miss Google Inbox

I very much agree. Also really miss the ability to quickly group related emails.

(And no, that was not the same as adding a label; for one, the whole group simply appeared as one "bigger" email in the Inbox. It was a bit like a thread that you can manually add emails to.)

When everybody got kicked out of Inbox I happened to have a group of about ten emails related to an upcoming trip. Those ten emails got de-grouped and scattered all around in the ordinary gmail interface. I would have appreciated a smoother transition...

I use Gmail's Snooze feature quite extensively. I've forgotten Inbox's implementation since it's been so long. What did it have that is missing from the Gmail snooze feature?

Gmail also has a built-in "Add to Tasks" but I never use that because it's too confusing for me.

The snooze feature itself was similar. What made it better was the ability to add tasks directly to the inbox and manage them with the same tools as emails, including snoozing. Kind of like sending an email to yourself but with fewer steps and a much nicer UI adding features like the ability to edit them. Also the ability to turn email threads into tasks by adding a quick note to them, to remind you what do do later. It made snoozing a tool you could manage all your tasks with instead of just email threads.

Someone ought to make a Chrome extension that adds this feature back, at least in the web UI. It ought to be doable. Each task would be an email to yourself, and you'd just provide a streamlined UI for creating and managing them. I have half a mind to try it with Claude sometime.

Move to Fastmail. It has snoozing and memos https://www.fastmail.com/blog/introducing-memos/

That's the ideal combination. I use it 20x a day.

Got an email I can't act on now? Snooze it to when it's the right time and add a note with the reminder.

- grandpa ask to bring a tool: snooze to early Saturday with a note "get him the tool"

- send "GDPR art. 17 account deletion request email" and snooze in 2 months to check account deletion

- recieve invoice due in a month, snooze in a month and write amount reminder in memo

I have a Saved search also that look for memos with text "TODO". Fastmail shows the memo content in the email snippet list, so you can see and process everything at a glance. And you can further filter by labels and more.

Gmail (which I've been using for 22 years) is just crap nowadays. If you can afford Fastmail (and Kagi), switch already. You will regret not to have moved earlier.

Yes! Fastmail is excellent. Pay a small / reasonable amount, be a customer (vs being the product). You'll never look back.

Hmm, can you create memos not attached to emails, as standalone tasks that you can edit at any time? Can you connect it to your Gmail address and how is the experience when doing that? Not interested in migrating to a new address.

I've built this kind of extension, but the backend being Linear (the issue tracker). I am able to mark an email as an issue, start it, complete it and see details about it, all within Gmail and synced with Linear. I guess using a local logic should also work - basically having everything inside the browser / extension.

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