Inbox by Gmail: now in more places | Hacker News Reader

Inbox by Gmail: now in more places

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79 pointsblackskad72 comments

This is the best way to manage your mail ever. I get a good amount of mail everyday, I use Inbox since day 1, and this is just too good. I can quickly scan a tag/inbox, and if I doesn't see anything relevant, just click on done, goodbye. See something you wants to do later? Just pin it. It'll stay on top. Everyone should give it a try. The product is very well done, and if you care enough about your mail to try new things on your workflow, just use it, you'll never come back.

Personally I'd love to try it, but all my work email is on Google Apps, not GMail, so no dice. I wish they had prioritized this because for me Inbox makes no sense for a low volume personal email account, which is what I use GMail for.

You can forward the work email to a regular gmail account (and set up the reply from feature so you can reply from yor work email address).

In some places that's a good way to get fired.

I get a lot of sensitive information in my work email; if I forwarded it all to a second account where my employer couldn't enforce things like two-factor auth I'd be in a lot of trouble.

Completely agree. I wrote a blog post about it a while back [0], but to me the killer feature is being able to pin items as to-dos (or create new todo's unassociated with an email), and then flip the switch so that you ONLY see these pinned items.

I love it because I can only look at my pinned items and focus on knocking a few out at a time, and only occasionally flipping back to the regular inbox view. (Which I find distracting when I need to focus.)

[0] - http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2014/12/02/the-super-magic-p...

I have been using the star/archive/spam method for a long time now in regular gmail. The inbox interface seems to slow down my flow, as it has little inbetween steps I find irrelevant.

I zip through my email in gmail using keybindings, se/e/! respectively with gmail set to go to next message automatically. Takes me a few seconds to go through about 20 emails, then I circle back to the ones I starred.

Inbox looks better, but feels a bit worse for me. Also, the no apps support as always is a downer, but us apps users are used to it.

I tried using it, but all the "pretty images" I found obnoxious. Although I do like the "sleep" style options, where I can put stuff to sleep and get notified later. I noticed my email throughput had decreased significantly using Inbox.

I receive somewhere between 75 - 200 emails a day. I need to quickly scan over the email titles + bodies and just remove emails that are not necessary to respond to. Inbox doesn't really provide data as clearly. Though, if I wasn't receiving an email every few minutes Inbox does seem like a really awesome choice.

Eh... is there any way to email a list of people without constantly adding them one. by. one. every time?

I often use gmail to send emails to my family and I just have a "Family" contact group setup in Gmail to do that (so in Gmail I just type "F" "a" "m" <tab> in the To: box and it's all setup). Most annoying aspect for me to using Gmail on Android and using Inbox in general, honestly.

Inbox is amazing for consuming incoming mail, and I'm hoping it will soon be able to consume Exchange.

I thought maybe +circles replaced that, but I can't even figure out how to send an email to a +circle.

Either I'm really dumb, or something obvious is missing.

Eh honestly Mailbox by Dropbox does a better job. There are no silly bundles that Mailbox forces you into, better snoozes, as well as just a better mobile app.

Plus, there's the huge risk that Google will kill this off in a year or so. Based on that history alone, all users should be reluctant to get on board with it.

I don't use snooze, or reminder. This is why I never use Inbox, there's way too many action possible on 1 mail. The done, later, pin of Inbox is perfect for quick management.

I think it's terrible.

It doesn't sync with their previous star system, so you're unable to move back and forth on services when Inbox is buggy or vice versa. Inbox doesn't store any mail locally on mobile, so you're unable to search without an internet connection -- I am on the subway frequently and this is very problematic. With GMail, you have a one click delete system; with Inbox, you have two steps to permanently delete a message. This is cumbersome when you receive "a good amount of email", and you want to delete rather than archive.

It's a cleaner design, and the other features are nice incremental improvements, but the new features do not outweigh the benefits that the existing GMail app and service offers.

It still strikes me how Google Apps users, who actually pay for GMail & Co., are always the last ones to get the new stuff.

Well they test it on the free users, and give the Apps users a more stable version later.

Some things have just never arrived for paying customers. Such as Google Now for Apps users, which would make more sense for things like travel reminders as most of my travel is business related.

Google Now works for Apps users. It just has a limited feature set from what I gather, which is even weirder.

Why is it weird? You can't simply mine the private data of paying customers which is needed for Google Now.

Why not? They could just make it opt-in through the admin console like almost everything else that companies might not need/want (Youtube, G+).

They already allow Google Apps admins to control whether Google Labs or experiments are available, not to mention specific controls about the various other apps. This could be handled exactly the same way to allow domain admins to control whether users can use Inbox.

This is opposite from the way car companies do it.

They test new ideas and features on the luxury brands and then roll them out to the mass market brands later at lower prices.

Isn't there a checkbox in the Apps admin to opt in to get features earlier?

Yes, however that is just getting Google App features earlier. So if a product isn't in the GApps pipeline you won't get it, opt in or not.

Inbox has declared since day 1 they plan to come to GApps. No idea what the hold up is. They dodged my question asking about the challenges during the AMA. (I think they chose not to answer it at all)

This is a source of frustration for me. I like the idea of Google Now, but as an Apps user, it is almost worthless as you cannot use Gmail cards. Gmail cards are the source of interesting things like flight status, package tracking, etc. Even more, I routinely have issues where upcoming appointments don't show up although I do not know if that is caused by being an Apps user.

I truly don't get the delay on both Inbox and Now - are the backend Gmail systems completely different? If it's just a worry that "enterprise won't like it," why not allow it to be turned on/off from the Admin console like so many other things?

My guess: data for their Apps customers are backed by completely different set of servers/infrastructure. This probably allows them to tell large potential customers that if GMail proper is ever hacked, their data would be safe (as it's part of some different system). It may also give them extra time to pen test new systems to make sure it isn't hackable before deploying it to the people that do trust it with their company's email.

That's feasible. It still strikes me as odd that even if Apps Gmail is indeed on different infrastructure that it would have a completely different API. All other Gmail clients (web,app,etc) work on Apps Gmail, in addition to vanilla IMAP.

I'd feel a lot better if they'd just explain what the hold up was, or if they don't plan on expanding to Apps customers. I'd be disappointed but at least I wouldn't be completely in the dark.

Apps Gmail is different, cause you can even get it self-hosted. Several larger companies actually use it self-hosted in-house without running it through google.

Sundar says this is rolling out: https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/568479868427632640

I still prefer Priority Inbox that's been around a few years now. I gave Inbox a shot, and it's very pretty, but I ultimately didn't find it as useful. Maybe I need to find the right settings to get Inbox to work the way I want, but... I'd be just as happy to not do that and stick with Priority Inbox.

What I like about Priority Inbox is that it shows me important emails, regardless of the type ("type" meaning the different categories that Inbox has). I.e., I don't generally care about "Promos" or "Updates," but there are a select few within them that I do care about. Priority Inbox figures that out, and promotes those particular ones. Inbox just groups them all together, so to see the one "Update" that I care about, I'd have to sift through that whole category to see it.

Gmail occasionally tries to convince me to switch to Inbox. I hope it's not the case that we'll all eventually be forced to switch...

Watching a talk from one of the guys that worked on Inbox, they built a lot of what they did on the power of what GMail already has. But their goal was to create a common flow that would handle most people's use-case. From what I've seen of inbox right now, there isn't a lot you can do to customize it. So until they start porting over features from GMail, I'd probably just stick with Priority Inbox if you like it's flow.

For me, Inbox solves my use-case for my personal email account. I never really put much time into organizing my gmail account to minimize noise, so Inbox was a good answer for me. Now, if Inbox was available for my work account I doubt I'd use it. I have carefully crafted lots of labels and filters to make Gmail an excellent solution for work, it just took more time to setup and maintain then what Inbox does for my personal email.

Agree completely with this. I love the "mark and sweep" aspect of Inbox, but after a couple of months with it, I think I have to go back to the old interface.

Inbox with a "Priority" bundle would be perfect.

What's weird is that if you try to create a label called "Important" in Inbox, it will say it already exists. Yet it doesn't show that label as an option when creating bundles. It's like they went out of their way to prevent you from doing exactly what you're suggesting.

Glad to see Safari and Firefox are now supported! The whole "Chrome only" thing was a bit of an initial disappointment.

I tried Inbox when it first started and I can say I pretty much hate it. It seems like it is a change just for changes sake. It doesn't seem to make me more productive in my inbox, only more frustrated that I can't seem to find the things I want. Everything seems jumbled and just is a mess. If they make it the default I can see myself actually going back to a desktop client and using something else for a mobile client.

I think machines still have some distance to go to achieve more usable guess-what-user-want. Many ideas have been tried, but I only see limited success in a few use cases.

I feel similarly. I do think that there are some folks for whom this interface makes sense, though.

I had the opposite experience. I managed to go through my entire 5 years worth of old emails and get down to inbox zero.

I love the snooze and pin features. The Android app is awesome. Swip to archive is such a nice way to deal with email, which (in my case) is 90% scan and bin. The web app isn't so awesome, mainly because of the lack of gestures.

Reminders added in Google Now show up in Inbox as well so I can be walking down the road and remember I need to do something tomorrow, and just add it to Google Now just by talking into my phone. 9 times out of ten I don't even have to spell correct the narrated text.

Inbox was the one single reason for me not dumping Gmail for Fastmail, which I was planning to do for privacy reasons.

I LOVED Inbox when it first came down, but earlier this week I switched back to gmail.

- I love the snooze and remind me later feature, but I absolutely hate their touchpad/scroll support, I don't understand how mails get automatically marked done when I am just trying to read them.

- The app is super heavy for my 2GB RAM Macbook Air(I have one for lightweight surfing at home), it slows down everything.

- The 3 clicks I have to do in order to read a single mail eventually got to me. Take for instance, imagine if I got a new mail, how many clicks do I have to do in order to read it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/y0tyqaualc7dpq7/Screenshot%202015-... Inbox's answer is 2 clicks, one for expanding the 'finance' section and second to open that mail. Isn't my intent obvious when I click on a folder that I wanna read that lone mail when I click on it? After clicking twice for 30 something mails a day, it got annoying.

- Inbox doesn't scan my hangout messages whenever I use its search. I search my hangout messages a lot, that means I return back to gmail. I assume they will add this functionality in future.

- The reply mess. If you are responding to an email, it has a decent inline responding ability, but the moment you stop responding or move away, you can't come back to the inline reply, you HAVE to edit that response outside of that experience. I see no reason why that should be the case.

- My corporate gmail accounts don't support inbox, so it ends up me having a weird experience of constantly using gmail and inbox both

I really like the Inbox app. It's email workflow directly matches how I've managed my email for the longest time. That said, it's missing one big important feature for a lot of us power users: a unified inbox.

I get a lot of email through the day and I need to get through it quickly. I also have 4 active email accounts. Having to constantly juggle the UI to switch between these accounts is a productivity killer and annoyance.

I get it, some people don't want and/or need the unified inbox and it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I'm not that person.

Dropbox's Mailbox app is a nice alternative (it's what I currently use). I feel the Inbox app is better constructed, but Mailbox has the features I need today and it works.

Oh, good. Now I can stop using the old interface in Firefox. That makes me happy; Inbox works with my brain a lot better.

Actually even before this announcement it worked fine in Firefox - you just had to change your user agent (or install one of the numerous extensions).

Google said it was because it was "slow" under Firefox, but since I never noticed a bug or any slowness on my two year old Macbook Air, it looked more like they just wanted to push Chrome to me.

I like Inbox, but I need a trash can shortcut. I don't want to archive junk mail.

I guess it's only one extra click for the trash. Google apparently wants you to save everything.

I completely agree. I'd guess at least 50% of my email is deleted immediately after reading and not because it's unwanted, but because it holds no long-term value. Inbox assumes that all email is better archived than deleted which is simply not the case.

When is it coming to the google apps? I recently switched my main email to the google apps and was excited for google inbox, but I still can not use it because it is disabled for us.

I really like inbox, but the lack of a prominent delete button annoys me to no end.

Yes, I know I can bundle up mail and then delete the batch - but I want a one click way of deleting a message that I know I will never read again (promo emails for example)

You could use the keyboard shortcut, #

I notice they haven't made these configurable yet - I was hard-wired to press d!

I tried Inbox, really tried to love it, eventually switched back. It's something about how it sorts or arranges your mail in non-chronological order that really messes with my way of finding things. Also only being able to see 7 emails on the screen is a huge issue - if I get 20+ emails, I'm not able to glance through all of them to get a sense of how much work I have to do that day. The end result is that I felt very uncomfortable and insecure using it, even though my brain told me that I loved it (because of the nice fast UI).

And my Gmail experience improved substantially with the introduction of tabs (Primary, Social, Updates..) so I did the same as you.

This headline really got my hopes up that this was finally the announcement of Inbox for Google Apps users...

Tried Inbox for week and felt like it was introducing more clutter than less! Switched back to Mailbox and the Mailbox for Mac beta and have no complaints, I like the simple clean interface and functionality. Just wish they made a darker theme.

Inbox is amazing. However, at some point the Android app started constantly crashing (even while being in the background) and now I have it crash every 30 seconds and no clue what's going on. Anyone else seen similar behaviour?

Has anyone compared Inbox by Gmail with Mailbox by Dropbox? They seem to fill similar roles, and I've been happily using Mailbox for a few weeks, but I haven't seen a detailed comparison.

Can you activate the web interface without having an android/iPhone smartphone? "Download Inbox on your phone to activate your account before using Inbox on the web."

Wow, no reply yet points out that this is part of the whole effort to undermine one of our few open standards (email) and eventually turn everything into siloed walled-garden platforms.

Once Google Inbox is used widely, people will find it that much harder to use other e-mail systems.

I can't seem to find it now, but I read a wonderful article about how Facebook messaging and all sorts of other silos are about these platforms controlling everything and Google wishes they could have that same sort of control and push everything into their own proprietary messaging, although this fragmentation is obviously destructive for the internet and society overall.

How is that different than Gmail, or even Hotmail, before this?

As i'm not too familiar with email as a standard, could you elaborate on how this undermines it?

I like inbox, on my phone. However, on a PC, I like the ability to use gmail's keyboard shortcuts etc. Inbox seems poorly designed for use as a desktop interface

Is it still defaulting to "reply all"? That was a showstopper for me.

Yes, but you can edit the recipient list.

That almost bit me the first time. I think it may have changed a little at least though. I hit 'r' to reply and just tried it on a thread and noticed it only had the sender in the recipients field. Same if you click on the little reply icon to the right. The default if you click in the field does as labeled though, 'Reply to all'.

actually that's something valuable! However I think they should make that configurable.

Why do I have to download an app if I just want to use it in the browser?

I tried Inbox when they firstly released, soon as I found its essentially the same thing as Mailbox.app, I switched back to that.

Wait.. then M$ re-branded outlook on iOS, simply outruns both Inbox and Mailbox.

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