...And Google Now and Lollipop's new Smart Notifications.

Really, downvoting? Care to explain?

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1689647?hl=en

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1638152?hl=en

...and I really hope that Google isn't going to force me to upgrade to Inbox.

If I had to wager on it, I'd say it's going to happen. User adoption is a powerful metric.

Mailbox was acquired by Dropbox some time ago.

Dropbox did.

I don't get more than maybe 10 emails a day on my personal account. Mailbox makes it fun to take care of them. I don't see myself needing anything more complex.

Yeah, but it's possible many folks trust Google and don't trust Dropbox (or haven't even heard of Mailbox) so it's interesting for Google to access that untapped market.

The gmail app has had the swipe to archive thing for a while now.

This looks very much like the end of Mailbox. If execution is half-decent (and it's a big "if", I haven't tried it yet), GMail users from now on will have no use for Mailbox or MailPilot.

No, it's web as well.

The latest product from Sparrow? I've been already into the refreshing UIs of Inbox.

Can't wait for the invitation.

GOS talked about it a few days ago before the announcement for those interested: http://googlesystem.blogspot.se/2014/10/google-inbox.html

I'm interested but I keep seeing that this sort of stuff never takes into accounts things such as mailing lists (a la mailman and such). I hope I'm wrong.

I really hope this means that if I disable this "Inbox" in Gmail clients I can get back my ASCII email...

You can request an invite by sending a E-Mail to inbox@google.com

This looks great. It seems like the extension of what they've been doing with Now for a while - all the information you need in easily actionable cards.

I get the impression that this is more the next generation of Google Now than it is the next generation of Gmail. (Google Now is all about plucking out information from larger sources of data and bringing the most important stuff to the front as it's needed.)

I suppose I could see how this would be useful if you're using your smart watch or your phone and only want the most important facts, boiled down to their essence. (But then, doesn't Google Now already do that?)

Outside of that context, it doesn't seem like you'll ordinarily have both Inbox and Gmail open at the same time, because (as far as I can see) Inbox is just a way of better organizing and presenting the underlying data, whereas Gmail is more like the raw feed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/personal-technology/2014/10/22/new-gmai...

Oh damn; the link from the OP I didn't see it but it's very clear on this page. Thanks!

Why, it's almost like the launch of any app, ever. Plenty of sites have more detail:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/22/7041227/google-inbox-hand...

I believe they typed the wrong URL; probably meant this page: http://www.google.com/inbox/

That's who you target first, to spread it toward people who aren't so technically inclined. iPhone wasn't for moms at first, and now many don't know what they'd do without it

Your absolutely right. The last 14 years of iPhones, Google Search, Gmail, Maps, Facebook, Social Networking, the very site you are using right now... can all be summed up by "a bunch of twenty-something hipsters from California high-fiving each other."

Lovely description. Now I know what Inbox is. Can wait to get my hands on it!

With vocal fry dressing.

Relevant doesn't necessarily mean requires actions. I average around 100-150 relevant work emails on a typical day (can also be 20), and plenty of them are ones that I only need to glance at for 5 seconds - some that I don't even need to read but need in my inbox for potentially looking up later.

I work in marketing for PC hardware, so very different sort of workflow to coding.

This is exactly what they want to do. Ads embedded in streams/feeds have proven to be the most profitable monetization strategy on mobile, and Google's missing the party on that one. It's an attempt to take one of their powerful, existing products and turn it into a mobile feed.

They make it "cloudy" on purpose since that's what it's all about according to them, the cloud.

Gosh! You're so right. The first thing I thought of when I saw the video was the same thing. Show me what the app does Google!

I think we just witnessed the first corporate pseudo-cool advertisement from Google. You know, when BigCorp tries to cater to the young and hip, thats the kind of video they produce. Crank it up a notch, and you're in the uncanny Samsung Valley.

I, for one, am looking forward to the Poochie rap!

I'm with you. Inbox never should have more than 15 items. Everything else is unlikely to be looked at again and gets thrown into an archive folder (Business/Orders/Correspondence). If I get mail I don't want, then I unsubscribe.

I'm also on the lighter side of email load/work, but I don't see how a simple/efficient/clean workflow like this could be improved.

You're definitely not the only one. I think these 'email is broken' changes are aimed at people who use smartphones and tablets that didn't use PCs before, trying to make it more chat client like. I think this might be a market force, but it definitely tramples traditional email, which is long form, non-instant, textual (not visual) communication medium.

I accumulated them over the years.

With the right software (Opera Mail) filters learn from what you drag into them and out of them. So there's no maintenance necessary to speak of.

> "The fact that you had to configure and maintain 119 filters is the indication that email is broken IMO."

Maybe it's not broken, maybe it's just being used by people in a way it wasn't meant to be. I bet a lot of people's email 'conversations' would work better in a chat app (i.e. they don't need an easily searchable record and they aren't typing long messages).

Of course its sane. I also have over a hundred. But if your system requires that I manually build and maintain hundreds of filters I still think something is broken. Its just an awful user experience.

"So HNers, do you really have a problem with your email workflow, or is everyone just repeating "email is broken" because some smart people with an ungodly amount of email said so?"

I did :) I found my personal email a mess. I have a lot of mailing lists i need to "semi" pay attention to, and get about 1000+ emails a day all told.

This was pretty messy to manage, even with foldering/labeling/etc and such.

Inbox is pretty nice for my workflow (i'm sure there are some it is good for, and some it is bad for). I have it figure out the importance of various mailing list messages, and then show them to me once a day per mailing list. I mark the ones i care about with pins or reminders, and it takes care of reminding me.

On the work side, i get even more email, and i don't have a great workflow there. But i'm completely an outlier. I essentially have two distinct jobs I do for the company.

Practicing inbox zero in either case is unlikely to work for various reasons (among other things, most of my job is not predicated on making quick decisions but on thoughtful ones I could just move everything to task lists, but it would just create another place with the same info and often a worse interface)

I'm with you, we use gmail on our work email now and I just use the google app sync so I can keep using outlook. I think regular old email from the 90's works fantastic.

The problem I have when I've used that strategy is that then I need to skim all of the emails and recall the state of each one. I find it to be both distracting and stressful—I'm reminded of every task I need to accomplish (or, at least, the most recent 20) whenever I check my email.

For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.

You've elucidated the reason I just bought OmniFocus. I need a system outside of all other systems to keep track of it all. I have 4 separate email systems to keep track of. Google's tool won't help me with 2 of them (or a ticketing system, or whatever). I used a web-based TODO manager for years, but I finally spent the money to get a native application. The integration of highlighting something -- in any app, or an email, or a web page -- and then hitting a keystroke to capture it, and give it a to-do, has proven pretty effective to me. THAT'S my inbox, and THAT'S the one place I check when I need to find something to do.

Read state shouldn't be overloaded with "still to ToDo", otherwise you don't really know how many ToDo items you have vs those you haven't triaged yet.

It's completely mental (not as in crazy, as in it's a mental issue). I like to keep things tidy, if something is in my inbox then it's something that needs to be dealt with.

Same goes for "starring for to-do" vs "unread as to-do". The latter does mix in requires-action with yet-to-read, but maybe a lot of us class a yet-to-read email as requiring an action anyway?

It's just a third state. I use unread for "not started", read-but-in-inbox for "in progress" and archived for "done". If you don't need that distinction between not started and in progress then sure, just leave it all read in your inbox.

Well you're right. I've been using Inbox for over a week, and I like it. No email clutter, and it matches my flow pretty well.

The video on the blog post says that it is separate from Gmail and that you are welcome to use both. I assume they plan on keeping it that way.

I have tried all kinds of intelligent note taking apps, GMail workflows, and so on. At the moment I think that the Unix philosophy works here as well: I use simple but working tools and I build my workflow on/with them instead of using a complex, big app/infrastructure that tries to find out what I'm interested in. So I'm stuck with an email provider that follows standards, and I feel good about being able to move to another provider, etc. in case I want to do so.

In most cases, I know what I want, and I am OK with opening the app that can do the job for me. However, I want that app work properly and always. That's why I don't find Google Now too appealing: I don't want a personal assistant who tries to figure out what I want. I want a personal assistant that can do what I want when I ask for it. I don't need an app that scrapes my email for airline tickets -- I need an app that makes me easy to look up delays and departure times. I don't want an app that sets an alarm clock automatically when I have a meeting because there are two cases: 1) I need an alarm, but then I need to be 100% sure that it's set (and I don't want to double check whether magical AI figured it out properly) 2) I don't need an alarm (so I don't want my personal assistant to set up one). I cannot risk missing somethink: if it's not important, I'll try to unsubscribe.

But that's only my use case.

Ah, and +1: I don't want to keep emails. If I don't want to retain some information, then I just delete it -- there's no search algorithm in sight thats accuracy is independent of the search space. More emails, items -> less effective search.

I too consider email to be a perfectly working system and I have achieved "inbox 0" since I started using email in 1994. IBM drilled it into me that my inbox wasn't meant to be a 'pending' queue, and as such I should action items or clear them out.

That and some general common sense has added up to me being bewildered when people discuss how difficult email is.

I really hope that doesn't come off as snarky, because it's not meant to be! :-)

I do the same thing, only in Thunderbird over IMAP with around 27,000 messages. TB search is fast and accurate, and I keep track of emails that need immediate action by starring them and then un-starring them after the action is taken. Pretty straightforward.

I agree with the don't archive email... Who cares if all my mail is in my inbox? That's what search and labels are for, but... Why bother with a "todo" label? Emails I need to act on are simply "starred".

It still is if your mailbox is over 10GB.

Actually, I see inbox zero (or near zero - I try to keep it under 10) as a time saver. It means I can instantly look at my inbox and see what items I need to work on.

If you just keep everything in your inbox, it means you need to click on a button to sort by starred emails. Also you need to star any emails you need to work on. Most of my emails take a while to respond to - I like to think about them for a while before responding. With your method I wouldn't be able to do that - I have to either respond to all my emails after reading them, or else star all my emails as 'needing work' until I have time to respond.

Keeping only a few items in my inbox that I need to work on is the most efficient way of working, at least for me.

"because search can't operate on it well (i.e. photos), "

People are working on that.

I dumped the Social and Promotions tabs because they're always there to bother me. I have a "subscriptions" tag that any vaguely noisy mailing lists go into and I rarely bother to look at it, but it's there if I want to. Rarely = once a month, maybe.

I also use inbox zero, but it took me 15 years to get to that point. That's quite a learning curve, and not built into email at all--it's something you have to discover outside of Gmail or any other email client. Combine that with the fact that the most recent generation is using email less and less, and products built around email are bound to evolve in order to remain relevant.

I've tried plus addressing. Some websites annoyingly don't accept them :(

The plus sign has been a valid character in email addresses since 1982 (RFC 822). See page 8: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html

I filter all messages with the word "unsubscribe" in the body into a "Bulk Mail" folder that I check once a week, works beautifully.

As for the per-category addressing, you can add "+flights" to your username when subscribing to flight notifications and then filter on that however you like...

I've been wanting something similar, but in the form of automated expiration after a certain amount of time (able to set "expiration" to either "Archive" or "Trash" in said rule).

For example, I'd love to be able to add a rule so that certain "deal" emails (those to which I'm purposely subscribed) to expire after say 1 day or 1 week - whatever the standard time for the sender's deals to typically last.

Then on the occasion that I end up in the woods, whether literally or figuratively, and unable to maintain my email for a couple days, I don't end up with an overwhelming and generally self-perpetuating inbox debt

Thanks for mentioning that. I use notmuch and the emacs mode for my email. It's absolutely the best email experience I've ever had.

I bet I could find plenty of people that would consider search to be broken if searching for vpn did return openvpn results. (Or the slightly less loaded example, if searching for 'man' returned results with 'almanac'.)

I'm with you. currently i have 3 emails in my inbox. the rest are archived. Like 85% of the population, my inbox is a todo list not a social engagement.

Exact same flow here.

Only the snoozed mails are stored until they are redelivered, as far as I can tell, but I can see your point. I personally don't care that much about privacy, if the convenience gains are high enough :)

"Mailbox stores a subset of your emails temporarily in order to redeliver snoozed emails, provide fast delivery and provide push notifications. We encrypt all communication to and from the Mailbox app, and all information cached on our servers is stored in an encrypted format." [0]

[0] http://www.mailboxapp.com/help/#/search?query=mailbox%20stor...

Google already has my emails (Gmail). If I use Mailbox I'm throwing another party into the mix. Google continues to get them and now Dropbox gets some of them too. It would be best to use the service of the company that gets them either way (Google). Why give your email to two companies when you can give them to one and get the same features?

Dropbox directly lied to users about privacy and stated they could not access your data. When this was pointed out, they made up excuses for lying and acted rather snotty about it (on HN). They also had that little "don't check passwords" incident, which night indicate more serious problems. I'd trust Google engineering over Dropbox, but Google is also evilly anti privacy so it's not much of a win.

Honestly, the workaround I always used for this is starring the e-mail or Boomerang it if it's really important. Also, mailing lists and social coupons get filtered immediately.

Boomerang is pretty similar to some features of Inbox.

It sounds like you're doing an adaptation of Inbox Zero anyway. It's Inbox-Starred rather than Inbox Zero, which to me sounds like what someone would do if their email didn't have an archive option. Or for people that generally don't like archival.

Personally, I didn't like archival at first, but now I'm quite addicted to it

Full Disclosure: I'm a Inbox Zero-er.

You're not satisfied with email itself, you're satisfied with your filtering software, plus your rigorous discipline, plus email. I don't think email is necessarily broken, so much as woefully incomplete for the kinds of tasks it's typically used for.

same here. there was a while ago article about usefulness of these manual organizer interfaces. they just don't work. what works is a system that can infer what you need to do from what you have done before give you maximum shortcut value. Example was presented - in facebook if you enter school you've been to you can post messages to these people - to field gets macro selector for your friends that have attended same school you did.

usually if I can't remember something - i usually don't really need to do that. I will definetly won't engage in this pseudo work.

Also how does this pass 20/80 test?

Well good on google. this sort of reminds me buzz they had. but I haven't played with this yet.

Fully agree with this. Boomerang has really been the only way my inbox has remained exclusively actionable items that are not blocked by waiting for people to reply.

I haven't seen Inbox yet, but it sounds like the "snooze" feature might solve this problem for many people.

I can provide a personal example, I work at a place where we have one and only one ticketing / bug tracking system, but it can't be used for ticketing / bug tracking because its only to be used in hyper procedural, formalized manner solely to generate numerical metrics. All actual ticket tracking / bug tracking work is organized manually by each individual in email.

Not entirely unlike how most corporations use Excel as their corporate standard database, although excel isn't technically a database. So email is not a ticketing system, but for us, it is.

A few hundred emails is not terribly unusual per day.

Filtering strategies are vital. Topic drift away from the subject line is strongly discouraged.

This is at one of the largest companies in the world.

I love Multiple Inbox for work emails, although for home I don't. My work email tends to get a bit cluttered during a project, but I try to get back to Inbox 0 when I get a moment to go through things.

My Multiple Inboxes are: Unread Inbox, Starred, Action/WaitingOn labels, Drafts and Unread (non-inbox). I had to add the last one as I was missing emails I hadn't read but had setup filters for. This deprioritizes them, but I still see them, and I can easily just mark them as read as they generally don't require much attention.

The other tip I'd say is learning the basics of keyboard shortcuts - I can open, assess and archive/delete an email very quickly because I use e/# (archive/delete respectively). I can burn through the unimportant emails very quickly that way.

Why does manual intervention (per se) make your zero-inbox so effective? This isn't somehow magically processing emails for you, it's just automating how those emails are handled after you decide what to do with them.

IIRC inbox-zero says you should file all of those to a "next week" or "next month" category and then once a week go through that inbox. This effectively removes the need to do that chore, because you can just say "put this back in front of me a week/month from now."

I don't see why this is any less "device agnostic" than any other method. You can use Inbox on mobile or desktop and they stay in sync; in fact, you can use Inbox on mobile and traditional Gmail on desktop (or vice-versa) and they'll stay in sync as well. (And you do in fact konw if the email is unread or not, since that's a separate bit of status info. You can snooze an email without reading it.)

"Select all last-year mail, archive. Done."

:)

Best post on the page. Email just works. It has worked for years and years and it will continue to work for years and years.

Some people use their inbox as a to-do list. Why they do this is beyond me. It's like making an alarm and flashing light inside your office and then putting the switch in a preschool.

SV is starting to look like 40 thousand really smart millenials sitting around looking for something useful to do.

Having said that, I'm sure Inbox is awesome. Google puts out good stuff. I'm just not so sure it's revolutionary or even significant. But that's for the market to decide, not a bunch of schmucks on the net.

I generally only archive the previous year's worth of email at the end of the next year. So I always have between 12 and 24 months of email in my inbox. But otherwise, much the same.

I agree and am mostly the same.

The only thing I also do is intentionally leave e-mails I still need to respond to, as unread, and keep my inbox sorted with unread e-mails at the top.

It works great. The only thing that annoys me is that most (?) e-mail clients automatically mark an e-mail as read as soon as it's opened. I'm constantly pressing "Cmd+U" in Gmail to go back to the inbox, while leaving the item as unread.

This doesn't really make it not spam. After a while, I do have to wonder why quite a few of my emails aren't just items in an RSS feed.

Same.

I had an inbox zero policy before that was a thing. It's the only sane way to deal with email.

Count today: ~100 work emails. Most take less than a second of time. Some, require <1 minute to reply. The outliers are the ones that require me to do actual work beyond email but those are luckily usually communicated otherwise.

I don't have a problem with my e-mail workflow, it took a while and much effort to get to that point though.

I don't find email broken (I use gmail). I typically have multiple emails in the inbox ready to be 'worked on' if they're unread. If they're read, I've done something with them (and it stops my phone flashing at me constantly). Then, at the end of every month I fetch all mail via POP3 and delete all emails from my inbox. The same goes for my phone (I use SMSBackup+ on Android).

But I still have my "offline" archive of data on my laptop, which I then backup once a month too. (Thanks TimeMachine).

Touche.

Maybe Google Outbox will end up being amazing.

Or folders. Didn't Gmail get rid of folders?

Snoozing emails, and turning emails into tasks, is the one feature that is important to me and gmail has been missing. I have tried some hacks like "mailbox" by dropbox, and "taskforce", etc, and they worked well, but it didn't work across all platforms.

I am looking forward to trying this out.

I have to imagine that this relies on an enormous amount of backend processing - and that it is a lot easier to do this with one Gmail backend.

The vast majority of my Gmail access is through IMAP, and I'm quite happy for Google to leave that alone. Their tastes are very different from mine, and change more frequently. I would not be happy to wake up one day to find that Google had shuffled my messages, created new folders, and randomly labeled my messages to look like the flag of the world cup-winning soccer team.

EWS (Exchange Web Services) is actually a very good and well-documented protocol built on top of HTTP/HTTPS. Unfortunately, it's Microsoft only, but it's the closest anyone's really come to a "modern" e-mail protocol.

That's a good question... I was under the assumption this was for gmail only. I guess I will have to wait for an invite and test it out myself.

Agreed. Was left less enthused and more suspicious of the product because they couldn't/wouldn't tell me what it was in the prmo video.

Interesting, thanks for the link!

I concur. I use email for work and "serious" stuff. For everything else, there's Facebook, SMS etc.

Google just made their launch look this cool http://youtu.be/6n1vtZR16RY

It is one step away from a feminine hygiene ad.

Ads are aspirational, not representational according to mostly everything wrote by thelastpsychiatrist. While they are bust-assing their studies they still aspire to look cool, friendly and careless. Hence the add.

I would argue this product is not made for you. It is made to grab market share of the twentysomething crowd from Twitter/Facebook as Google sees it's gmail views shrink. These types of ads appeal to twentysomethings. Yes they're vapid and contentless, but that's what works to get that market to sign up to a product.

Stock video that is so generic it has no relation to your product and conveys nothing about the product?

I'm sure you'll get 20 VC funds camping on your lawn for the chance to fund that one, but that says more about them really.

I find it interesting that I'm not the only one turned off by that video. I thought maybe I'm just not the target demographic but now that you mention it; it looks like just about every other video marketing some tech production. Its so... cookie cutter.

Indeed, the video got me thinking that they've probably done a lot of user testing already and they're confident to market it past the HN-type of people.

It also looks so confident that I thought I (31 years old) wasn't in their demographics anymore, and given I'm used to a Gmail interface which was invented in 2006, it may soon be going out of the door, but that's an inner fear of me which is talking.

Is there any tech product today whose creators would say it is not "designed for mobile use, on the go, for a diverse array of tasks"?

Young urban people fit that demographic a lot more than a suburban commuter would, since that lifestyle comes with a pretty set routine and a limited variety of schedules

Yeah, no way a person with three kids and a full-time job has a hectic schedule.

Good point, I agree. After watching the video, I cannot remember any features of this product.

What

Agreed. Disappointing to have so little technical details on something as critical as email on the blog post. Understand less technical approach in tv ads and such but the blog is the place to provide some actual details about the product.

Yep, as much as this is the typical HN type response, I completely agree with you.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Video often gives you a better idea of how the product will feel to use, not emotionally, but dynamically.

Take for example Google's "Material Design" in Android L, you can read all the articles you want, but the concept won't make sense until you watch a video of the animation/transitions/etc. There are a lot of products/ideas like that. They say an image is a thousand words, and this isn't a sixty thousand word article.

I think it is silly to suggest that people who prefer video content over an article are "less intelligent." Instead those people want to get an idea of how the product would actually work in reality rather than just eating up all the carefully crafted marketing language within the article.

This is why unboxing videos and amateur product demos are so damn popular on YouTube: They actually give you a true-to-life idea of how a product would be. Articles are too carefully crafted, and seeing the product without the person interacting with the product is only 1/2 the message or less.

It's all stock video except the shots with the ad in it. Note how the fun cool skateboarding people are never looking at Inbox.

I'm sorry but some Zune ads were awesome.

http://vimeo.com/14784213

I was also put off by the video, made me pretty much disinterested in the product as well.

After a bit of introspection, I think the turn off is the cheap emotional ploy that you will somehow gain a lifestyle from using their inbox filtering app.

You know, after finishing a shift on your kickstarted-funded peruvian food truck, you can go practice with your band and take selfies.

For me, it would be far more effective if they showed me how the product would help an average everyday person.

A lot of people use their email as a place for reminders.

I don't understand why people want some algorithm to sort your email for you. IMO email should always be sorted chronologically, and if it's too much, then used rules and folders/labels. Your inbox is not the place to add reminders.

What the hell, what kind of inbox-policing is that? How about "I don't understand why people would ever want to use a Mac, IMO the window management buttons should always be on the right side"?

People have different tastes, different workflows and different use cases. Is that really so hard to understand that you need to call this "the facebook of email"?

I don't understand why people want some algorithm to sort your email...if it's too much, then used rules and folders/labels.

What, really, is the difference? I see many of Gmail's changes as the automatic equivalent to rules/labels and they have a massive sample set to base it all on.

rules for every ... mailing list I join

This one at least is solved for me now, since most list software implemented RFC 2919 a few years ago. Lists should include a list-id header, so just write one rule "if mail is to a list named foobar, file it in lists/foobar". Or if you don't care to separate them out, even just "if mail is to a list, file it in lists".

It's mostly just a hypothetical, I don't expect anyone to have the answer (Google won't even officially acknowledge that Now integration is broken in GApps).

It is mostly annoying that Google introduces new features that they apparently don't care about making work for their paying customers.

That turns out to be the case.

Yeah, I don't get it, my gapps account works great with now?

Complaining about being flagged on HN usually invites more flags.

Not supported is not broken.

Perhaps cool. I honestly wish they'd change their approach to quality & bug reporting, though. I get the impression that all of their developers are so busy making new & shiny that the tools that we rely on everyday are just languishing. I've never had any bug that I've reported via their product forums fixed.

What I would like to see is Gmail becoming more like Zendesk/Desk.com. So I can effectively manage responses, contacts, etc, with a single click and pre-defined responses.

Hmm. I'm not sure that this is actually an email app. For the record, I think Gmail and its steady incremental improvements embody email perfection -- I can't imagine going back to life before auto-sorted tabs -- and I'm totally willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Still... it's tough to see how Inbox improves on Gmail.

Instead of email, I think Inbox is an effort to finally (FINALLY) improve GTasks by marrying it into Gmail and Google Now. GTasks is woefully lacking. My recent switch to Trello has absolutely revolutionized my work flow, more than I thought possible. Inbox's autotasking looks like a big improvement on the dumb list, but it still doesn't look like a real competitor to Trello's kanban system.

(One last plug for Trello, just because using it for an hour has turned me into a wild-eyed fanatic. It's AMAZING. Try it!)

also https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/

I've been messing around with the new email schema stuff that Google has had out for the past year or so.

I'm really looking forward to having a more intelligent layer around email. It's a great messaging protocol but up until now it's been mostly contextless.

I don't see email going away anytime soon and projects like this just confirm its usefulness.

For those who haven't seen it yet take a look at Google's email schema stuff: https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/

There were bad Google outages earlier today (at least in the UK). I wonder if these were connected?

A "new way" to push a "sponsored content" to me, like FB's feed does?)

MIT can't be thrilled with the name being taken (albeit it Inbox is so generic I dont see this brand becoming worth much)[1][2]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999814

[2]http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/07/mit-and-dropbox-alums-launc...

Google Apps free edition (up to 10x users) no longer exists unless you were grandfathered in. Now it starts at $5/user/month.

Same - the help page says it's not available at all for Google Apps accounts, only for personal Gmail accounts.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6082718?rd=2

Since I only use my @gmail.com account for spam and have my own domain for personal emails, guess this is a no go for me. I was considering switching back to a personally hosted mailserver for privacy reasons anyway, would have liked to try this though.

This is quickly becoming SOP... I'm still waiting for Google Now Gmail cards >:/

(And as a single-user apps account I don't even get the recently-released unlimited storage...)

When I got the demo on Monday, I was struck most by how Google Now technology was integrated. That's why I called my piece (on Medium/Backchannel) "Inbox, the app child of Gmail and Google Now." Now that I have the app, I'm enjoying it. Very clean.

I'd love to see the data behind why this justified a team of 100+ people making more than 100,000 per year to re-invent email.

Does the typical email user have an inbox which is half empty? Do users just read email that seems exciting? Do users want to just glance at their email periodically?

It's accessible via inbox.google.com, so works on Chrome as well as iOS and Android.

I haven't tested it, but watching the video with no sound it looks like making email more like a social network. Either way, how about going back to the way email used to be? I dislike composing e-mails inline, I dislike having to dig through a menu to pop out a modal, or having to memorize everyone's icons because apparently text isn't cool anymore.. how about giving me a page dedicated to composing, instead of adding another layer to the current page and hiding the options from plain sight? From what I've seen on this so far, it appears that this moves in the opposite direction of that

You can even teach Inbox to adapt to the way you work by choosing which emails you’d like to see grouped together.

Finally!

Today, we’re introducing something new. It’s called Exfil. Years in the making, Exfil is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it’s not Gmail: it’s a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters.

Email started simply as a way to send digital notes around the office. But fast-forward 30 years and with just the phone in your pocket, you can use email to send your most intimate thoughts, feelings and sexual fantasies to an undisclosed warehouse in Utah where our expert systems will analyse it for signs of emerging criminality, non-normative behaviour or just any juicy information that we can sell to some dude who's willing to pay.

With this evolution comes new challenges: we get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when you use encryption. For many of us, dealing with encryption has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do - so we decided not to use it and to make sure that your email is always stored in plain text so that we can read it easily and hand out copies in bulk to all our friends, associates and subcontractors.

These bundles, categories, etc. that are being introduced really just seem like re-hashed labels. Why did they need to introduce these other methods of grouping e-mails together?

Sending an email to inbox@google.com fails with the error : "the user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered."

I've been using Inbox and you won't miss anything. The auto-surfacing is really not as aggressive as you might imagine. If you just use Inbox without changing any settings you basically just get a cool GMail UI with the addition of 'Done' or 'Remind me Later' on each message.

Same here. Got the error, emailed a second time, it worked.

Aw give 'em some credit, they basically just got too popular and hit a rate limit. Nice indeed.

No doubt, was just funny in this context.

Same here, and I believe that's the norm. I was confused by "we love email" and their choice of showing young people messaging each other as the typical use-case for email.

Most of my non-face to face communication is email. But I'm old, and I have old friends. My phone is mostly for listening to voicemail and letting the NSA know where I am. [Hi guys.]

If I could just get my sixteen year old to email me instead of text, I'd be very happy.

University is a bit a odd case - it's often a mix between work and private life and during that time I indeed used email quite a bit more for private communication.

I don't why your comment triggered that thought but it happens that almost no one in my circle of friends has much to do with IT - they have computers, but they use them to surf the web and play games. I bet almost no one has an email client installed. So maybe it is more common to use email under tech-savvy people.

Email is probably the main method of text communication with about half of my friends and relatives. Plus I have a few subscriptions, notifications etc.

I'm not a PM so I can't speak to the decision itself, but I don't think grafting on the Inbox workflow to the Gmail interface would have worked out. It would have made both of them very muddled, and given the impression Inbox has more flexibility that it really wants to give.

Two apps using the same backend data (you can switch between Gmail and Inbox if you like) seems a better fit.

Every time they add features to gmail, people on forums like this one scream "OH MY GOD GOOGLE LITERALLY KILLED MY SISTER". It's a lot less irritating to make major changes in a new product.

I assume they wanted a fresh start.

That was a good guess except for being totally incorrect. Inbox starts with whatever is already in your Gmail.

Why do you think they created a completely new app rather than integrating features into the gmail app one by one?

As I see it, it lets people wanting to try the new thing do so, but has zero effect on people happy with what Gmail does now who don't want to be distracted either by more option clutter or the features themselves.

Further, it lets people wanting to use the new workflow do so without clutter from the regular Gmail interface (and being a more focussed interface is the key "interesting feature".)

It's too different from Gmail to be integrated into it. It coexists with Gmail so that you can choose to use Inbox and its "opinionated" workflow, or not. Users who like their personal Gmail workflow probably wouldn't appreciate having that flexibility taken away if it's not aligned with how Inbox wants you to work.

Because for many people that would be the final straw to push them out from Gmail, leading to them leaving Google completely, since once Gmail is gone, there's hardly a reason to keep Google account anymore.

I bet his university's Gmail has auto-lookup for contacts.

Gmail on mobile (both Android and iOS) both handle multiple Gmail accounts gracefully (personal, google apps, etc). To merge them seamlessly in the interface would be trivial.

In this case I was talking about Inbox, which in my mind should be a all-in-one gmail inbox.

In general Google tends to keep accounts siloed, if for no other reason than that different accounts is the solution recommended to people who want to silo things.

This is how BlackBerry 10 devices handle the difference between personal and work applications. Al though, it's just one application running two instances with app data in two different locations.

OK, I'll have to look into that feature. Thanks for answering!

but be aware, "send as" isn't disguising the base email.account in the free gmail-non-business-version: e.g. outlook shows which smtp-server was used.

Only people who receive an invitation can use Inbox by Gmail, and they can only access Inbox through their personal Gmail account, not through their Google Apps accounts. People who receive an invite to their Google Apps account can forward it and use it on their personal account if they want to. https://support.google.com/a/answer/6082718

They can't be big, as I know Google employees can use it for Apps accounts already. No idea why they haven't enabled it for us mere mortals.

inbox.google.com mentions iOS

There's an app for iOS, Android, and a web app for desktop (and I think mobile web, though I've never used it).

Yes, this. I have my @google.com address, and my @gmail.com address.

Not currently, to my knowledge.

I'm not sure if you have any invites left, but if you do, here is a link to the support page that has directions on sharing an invite:

https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6067582?p=invite_req...

Once you get Inbox, you'll have invites to send to your friends. Here's how to send an invite:

1. Open Inbox. 2. In the bottom right, go to the Create button . 3. Choose Invite to Inbox .

If you could do that for me, I would be grateful! (banderon1 "at" gmail "dot" com)

If you have an invite for google inbox, will you please share it with me, please? alex@allwrite.tk

Thanks, Alex

Interesting review. It almost sounds odd that someone likes the new "Compose" in a Google product...

If you can spare an invite, I'd be glad to try it out: ozhozh at gmail dot com -- thanks in any case.

If you happen to have intives and you are able to send, could you send me one too? Thank you. My e-mail: batuhanicoz@gmail.com

code_ Will you please have an invite for google Inbox to share, please? alex@allwrite.tk

Thanks,

This sounds interesting - I've been waiting for a while for Google to use more ML on the client side in g-mail.

I would really appreciate an invite at inglor at gmail dot com?

I think the clustering either has been trained very well, or uses a very conservative rule-based system. It seems to work great!

if you have an invite send me thx: juliengenoud@gmail.com

I'd appreciate an invite as well. gary.x.lu@gmail.com

Any invites for google inbox, pretty please?

I can't edit this original post, but it seems I can't invite people yet; will update when I do.

If you still have an invite, I would appreciate it. bkrishnan at gmail dot com

Why are you concerned with the amount of information it can hold if you only ever have 5 emails in your inbox?

Oh, also, I don't know how to invite people yet.

Its from the create (+) button, but I don't think you necessarily start with invites right away, and I don't think it shows the Invite option after you hit the create button unless you have invites.

At least, I'm assuming that's why I've never seen the invite button in my Inbox (app or web) even though I've seen the instructions on the support page.

On the plus side, it only took me a few hours to get an invite from Google just by emailing inbox@google.com.

If you still have an invite, I'd really like one:

bertrand dot chardon at gmail dot com

Thank you very much.

I think it will "sweep" all unpinned emails, but even after the emails have been marked as Done, you can still easily access them by clicking on the bundle (e.g. "Travel").

Yes. Things marked as done in Inbox (including marking many things as Done by sweeping) are shown as archived in Gmail (and vice versa).

MS Outlook (since v2003) provides the same (?) useful feature out of the box.

ToDo's based on emails, chat, sms, (or any other msg obj) and metadata based filters are very useful.

I created dozends of advanced filters in GMail in 2006, as my first account grew to 5 GB (thanks to about 20 of mailing list) in 2009 my GMail account got unbearable slow. I had to create a new account (the advanced filters are still there, but there is no intuitive UI anymore, you have to type in their syntax). I occacionally login to my old account and it is still dog slow - so I have my doubts that advanced filter scale in GMail/Inbox.

me too :)

my username is my gmail

Will anybody, please get me an invite for google Inbox, please? alex@allwrite.tk

I've been using Mailbox for a while on mobile and more recently on desktop and I'm wondering how it compares to that app? Also, are the new Inbox features in the app available on the web as well? I ask because desktop management of email is a great feature that Mailbox's beta desktop app provides.

It won't. It's not a shared task system (Trello/GQueues/etc).

"Inbox functions very much more like a ToDo list than it does an email client."

That's exciting to hear, since I've recently started turning Mailbox into a combination email client/to-do list/evernote replacement. I've found that having all those concerns in different apps meant that I never wound up using any of them often enough.

The shared concern seems to be the triaging of things that hit an "inbox" of sorts. Email hits the literal inbox, to do's hit my "stuff I need to do" buffer, and notes hit my "categorize these notes later" buffer (I compulsively note things down for later). Ultimately triaging things as their hit the Mailbox inbox is most effective for me, so I've turned it into my single source of triaging.

I'll definitely give this a shot if/when I ever get an invite ...

"only works in Chrome". Sorry, not interested.

It's good that they got the 'bundles' in there, but much of this looks like it's a Google Now integration into Gmail. There's a ton of anxiety around information gathering, organizing, monitoring, and 'checking the box' that this solution glances by, but doesn't directly address. I don't believe this solution will compete with most people's other email inbox.

Seriously folks, who cares. It's a minor change to gmail's workflow.

No really, think about it. It's just email.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     inbox@inbox.gmrservice.ext.google.com

... The error that the other server returned was: 550-5.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that 550-5.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. For more 550-5.2.1 information, please visit 550 5.2.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6592 fl6si3394876qcb.0 - gsmtp

Anyone knows what that "rate limit" is?

I opened Inbox and it crashed within 10 seconds. :-(

Inbox changes nothing about how email works. It simply tries to make the UI/UX more useful. Gmail content is what powers Inbox.

And here I am with a Windows Phone.

Video: we're fixing email because people send too much of it

Blog Post: email inbox@google.com to try it.

..I got a good chuckle.

from the site is is just gmail with the ability to accept/snooze calendar events.

also the spam inbox (what they are trying to label as offers or something on gmail) is not part of the priority inbox.

besides that, and all the smiling happy people in the Ad, all i could grasp is that they added lots and lots of white space around each message to compensate for the humongous size of that phone screen.

It will be interesting to see how companies like Boxer 'pivot' in response to this. I started using Boxer a little while ago specifically to deal with the email-becomes-todo-item issue which Gmail generally lacked. Not sure I'd have any reason to continue to use it if I could score an invite to Inbox (hint hint).

I watched it without sound. Definitely enough to put me off forever.

I just tried it on Yosemite/Safari 8 and it seems to work for me.

It works for me, and doesn't obviously glitch in the sense of dropping frames, but it feels wrong. The animations all start really slow, and the curves are way off the curves of OS-native features that do a page-at-a-time swipe. Also, if you continuous scroll with the trackpad and backtrack your fingers even a little, it jumps back a section. Still, I am not sure it is easy to fix these issues given what the web platform offers today, and kudos for not blatantly dropping frames.

Yes.

I found it disruptive and inconsistent. First of all, it disables the scrollbar and Page Up/Page Down, so I had to resort to the arrow keys. Sometimes scrolling moves the screen, sometimes it activates an animation. I found myself repeatedly blowing past sections because I was trying to scroll enough to bypass the content currently on the screen.

There wasn't anything about the experience that wouldn't have been as well served by a normal scrolling page with animations activated by a click.

Google really knows how to toy with my emotions with these videos.

You should probably work on getting less email then. I find zero inbox easy to do. It takes practice, but I also unsub from newsletters and reduced my work load. Tons of email is a symptom of either over-loading yourself with work or not managing how you communicate with people well.

I can't stand how little I can see at a glance in my inbox now. With the Gmail app on my Nexus 5, I could see 7 emails in the default inbox view. With Inbox I can see 3. Two of which do not include a subject line because they have been grouped "Social" or "Purchases" and will take an additional tap to view. I'm going to give it some time, but for now I find most of the content to be a horrible waste of space.

Google don't make money on Search. They make money on Advertising.

I don't have Inbox yet, but I don't think everyone gets invites immediately. Anyways, here's some info:

Once you have an invite, you can hover over the red create button and you will see a gold ticket - Invite to Inbox. Select that to enter your friend's email address and send the invitation. > Quick note: if you received an invite from a friend today, your 3 invites to share won't be available until this Friday.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/gmail/nCtyOEbZH...

Yep, you're correct. I should have been more clear in that while some of this was in Google Now, it didn't really "manage your email" like this does.

I was specifically referencing the scene where Sam is noting key points about the various things in his inbox and organizing it for him. Of course the movie title is possibly one of the most generic words out there, so finding a link to share is non-trivial :)

If e-mail were indeed only messages from people we'd have no need for these products. But it's not realistic to expect that anything we pay close attention to won't be thwarted by some form of spam or advertising in this day and age.

Eventual consistency / Lost Updates at play? I have tried sweeping the "Low Priority" emails; whenever I clicked the tick that group entry was gone. So far so good. However, whenever a new email popped up and was classified in that group, the whole group appeared again.

Or am I just misunderstanding the feature and do I just have to mark individual email as done one by one?

Still, people wanting to use it will likely switch to chrome. That's a tactic google already used for hangouts - only to end up with a very unconvincing "oops, that was a mistake" answer (see https://twitter.com/johnath/status/486575645338918912).

Instead, you could just notify the user that performance may not be as good on other browsers for now.

What specific problems does this create that prevents you from shipping with a degraded experience?

It's not just a degraded experience as in 'turn off this feature', the bug in question affects the entire infrastructure of how the app works, since it is part of the message passing and serialization mechanism used. It's legal, standard, JS, that just happens to run slow.

In this case, a workaround is available, and it is already fixed, but not shipped, because we froze commits some time ago for launch.

That's either a lie or incredibly naive. You wouldn't have shipped without iOS. Full-stop.

You mean like we didn't ship support for Android tablets? You would have thought with the big Android Lollipop and Nexus 9 launch, we would have made sure this worked there, right?

Maybe you should think about Hanlon's Razor as an explanation.

That was quick: a patch was checked in earlier!

This returns in in 3ms on IE11. Just for fun, I tested on IE6; it's just as fast. http://imgur.com/CFRSNoq

Try it yourself: http://canhaz.azurewebsites.net/ http://www.browserstack.com/start#os=Windows&os_version=XP&b...

If you just file a bug on Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/) in the Core: Graphics component with a reproducible testcase that will probably get people looking at it pretty quickly. For more one-on-one contact I'd suggest the #gfx channel on the Mozilla IRC, although that tends to work best if you know who to reach out to specifically. The gfx newsgroup (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.tech.gfx) might also work to call attention to a particular issue. You can probably setup an e-mail contact through one of those channels if that's what you prefer.

I can sympathize with you because cross-browser development can be frustrating at times. However, when you ship a product and only support one browser (which happens to be the browser your company makes) you're making a statement (even if it's only implicit) that you don't really care about the open web. You personally may care about the open web, and I'm glad the issue is fixed internally, but releasing a major web application with support for only one web browser is a big "fuck you" to the web.

Even more odd is they still have their message about FF not being supported for Inbox up for Nightly. I just switched my User Agent to Chrome and Inbox works fine in FF.

It doesn't use any Chrome specific features and it will work on FF

Does "will work on FF" mean "FF will eventually be supported"? Because today we see: "Inbox only works in Google Chrome. More browsers coming soon. Download Google Chrome."

The first video on the page is useless. Full of images of people on their computer and phones, running on the beach, etc. After watching the video, I still have no idea what Inbox really is besides "an improvement to email" (supposedly).

years in the making of solving a problem that doesn't exist. another google "wave".

When composing in Inbox, how do we get the nice "Plain text mode" option available in Gmail? The most useful thing it brings is to automatically line-wrap the emails.