Franky, I had the exact opposite opinion. Inbox was neat, but I was less productive with it.
As I keep saying, you have to change yourself. If you just use Inbox, that wonât work. You had to change yourself to work the Inbox way.
The problem is that I now I have to change myself back to live the GMail way.
Yes, but I didnât like the Inbox way. Iâm not going to change myself to do something I do not like. I did try it for a while, was like, âmeh, kind of neat, but it doesnât work for me.â
Iâve got nothing against people who did like Inbox, and yeah, it sucks for you guys and I feel for you to an extent. Iâve been bitten by Google dropping stuff I liked myself (Iâm looking at you, Google Reader), so I understand where youâre coming from.
Having never bothered with inbox, I continue to read every email I receive the day I receive it.
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I moved from inbox to Outlook and so far it is fine.
@Apreche
What exactly was trip bundling? Was that just some kind of filter that moved vacation related emails to a folder or something?
It could intelligently detect that certain emails were related to travel, and could even figure out which ones went with which trip. it would them group them into a single block. It would also extract very useful transportation and hotel information and put it into a header on that block.
Gmail does this same stuff for me. It extracts flight info and displays it in block headers. It also extracts my hotels and marks them in the Google Maps app.
That said, I think my iOS mail app also does the same thing, including putting things in my calendar.
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Yeah. It also all just appears in Google Trips. I use it heavily and have for some time.
Yes, but Inbox does it to to extreme, and also groups all the things related to the same trip together into one bunch. The bundling was the primary thing.
The fundamental concept of Inbox was complete abstraction of email. Emails were treated just as raw data to power a UI that would let you organize your life. If you have an email itâs because you need to do something. Maybe itâs a conversation you need to reply to. Maybe you ordered something and are waiting for it to arrive. Maybe itâs info for a trip you are going to go on. Just about every email is actionable in some way, and the ones that arenât, you unsubscribe.
Inbox put this giant green checkbox front and center on all emails and email bundles. When you are done with something, you push that check and the message is gone. In Gmail, this is the same thing as archiving messages.
You donât really need to see the actual contents of the vast majority of emails. If you get one that says âyour rent is dueâ you just need to have that line item which is essentially a reminder to pay your rent. The contents of the email are meaningless. You just need the line, and the giant green check to press after you pay the rent and make it go away.
But without the grouping of Inbox, all the messages relating to the same thing are scattered and mixed in the list view with the other unrelated messages. I canât click one box when I get home from my trip to archive the plane tickets, and the hotel reservations, etc. I have to pick through the other emails to find each one individually. The archive button is also small and significantly less prominent than the enormous green check.
GMail also separates the different high level groupings of Promotions, Updates, etc. into tabs. I have to click back and forth to see whatâs in there. Inboxâs groupings let me see everything at once. GMail I have a ton of blank space on my screen for no reason. I have to click just to see my promotions and updates.
vs.
Not to mention the pure aesthetic differences. Google Inbox actually looks like software thatâs from the 2010-2015 era of design. GMail, even updated, is clearly from the 2005-2010 era. Itâs like being forced back into a Model T.
4 Likes
Looks like an interesting product, but not my kind of thing. I never have emails in any inbox after Iâve read it. Everything is archived right away, and if it needs anything Iâll add that to my diary or a to do list.
Well, doesnât matter now because they killed it. I used it all 5 years, and then poof.
Turn off the promotions and updates tabs, like a sane person. One inbox, one tab, reverse chronological order.
I want the groupings, I just want to see them all at once instead of in tabs because there are so few items in each one.
Do not, my friends, grow addicted to unpaid-for Google services.
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Indeed⌠I actually have a backup plan to move my mail hosting to ProtonMail if/when GMail becomes too much of an issue for whatever reason. And yes, Iâd be using a paid ProtonMail account.
I have been debating this myself for a while is there a process to move it over?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
" A Google spokesperson told me that the company is âdeeply committed to protecting our users from spam across our services,â pointing out that the company has options for users to report spam in Calendar and Maps and to block users on Hangouts. But even Hangoutsâ blocking function only works once youâve accepted chat requests. It wonât stop new spammersâ invitations from popping up."
Invitation spam is a huge unsolved problem across all sorts of software. Even this forum has this problem. There are plenty of tools to stop spammers from getting in here and spamming it up. But thereâs not much to stop someone from spamming the registration form and forcing me to manually go through and approve/reject all the applications.