Hey Google, why'd you kill Inbox? Google Home: My apologies I don't understand.
Me: yeah me neither Google, me neither...
a few weeks ago Google announced that it was going to kill another one of its
beloved products by its passionate Google fan base as the headstone read
google is killing inbox now those of you who are unfamiliar with inbox you may be
wondering what the heck is the big deal about inbox well in this video I'm going
to describe what inbox is why it has been so fundamentally different from
Gmail and why I think it's a mistake for Google to kill it
inbox by Gmail was introduced to the world in 2014 as Google's new
experimental inbox it was an entirely different new way to experience your
email inbox if you were a gmail user inbox simplifies the email experience at
its core its entire goal is to get users to spend less time on email and its
features mapped to this goal first let's look at the interface the inbox UI is
simple clean and refreshing looking you have different bundles email lists and
the main features on the left side of the display and in the middle or to the
right you have all of your emails looking at the same inbox on Gmail and
inbox there aren't a lot less emails to look at in inbox thanks to bundling
bundling is a feature where your emails are bundled into groups like purchases
trips or the best one promotions they make your inbox way less cluttered
overall if you get a lot of promotional emails and don't have time to read
through them all you can simply mark them all as done or
you can scroll through the bundles list if you want to read through them in more
detail later you can use another great feature of inbox which is the snooze
feature snooze allows you to send an unread email or a group of emails out of
your inbox so you can have them reappear at a later time on the phone app you can
easily do this by swiping left on the message or messages in the iOS Gmail app
unfortunately there's no easy gesture that does this in the Android app you
can enable the swipe to snooze feature but for iOS users you have to go into
the mess and then click the three dots and then
click snooze I use this news feature a lot especially for bills
I'll snooze bill emails so they come back up closer to when they're actually
due and that way they're not just sitting in my inbox until the end of the
month looking at how inbox organizes your emails into bundles and the snooze
functionality you can start to see how fundamentally different it is from a
normal email inbox I treat my inbox more like a task list I keep the emails in my
inbox that I haven't read or I need to follow up with an action item on once
I've completed in action I mark the email done on the phone app this is even
easier since you can just swipe the message away to the right marking
something done in inbox is basically the same thing as archiving the message in
Gmail though I like the terminology much better in inbox
I feel more hesitant about sending something to an archive than just saying
I'm done with it if you need to add something to your inbox and if you're
like me and treating your inbox like a task list you can easily hit the plus
button and add a reminder to your inbox reminders set up from your google home
devices or by the Google assistant on your mobile phone will also appear here
as well the task list approach is especially handy at work where I use
inbox every day ever reach out to someone who hasn't followed up after a
couple of days well inbox will notice this and
automatically bring the message you originally sent back up into your inbox
suggesting that you reach out to that person or if you've received a message
and haven't replied to it after a couple of days inbox will notice this behavior
as well bring it back into your inbox and suggest that you reply to the
message you can also pin important messages to the top of inbox that way
they'll be the first thing you see every time you open inbox sent an email but
you just realized you forgot the subject line or spell the person's name wrong
you can easily undo your send action if you act within 5 to 7 seconds after you
hit the send button on an email another situation where inbox really
shines at work is smart replies based on the text of an email that is sent to you
inbox will suggest smart replies when you're composing the response to the
message which saves a lot of time as you can see inbox is quite a little nifty
tool for getting work done and thankfully Google has realized this and
brought a lot of inboxes features in to Gmail this includes snooze smart replies
as well as hover actions however Google still hasn't brought bundles inboxes
arguably that's the best feature from inbox into Gmail and the inbox UI is
still way simpler to use than Gmail's now Google has announced that bundling
will eventually come to Gmail but it didn't give a timeline now presumably
this would happen before inboxes sunset in March of 2019 bundling is by far the
most useful feature of inbox need to see all the emails regarding an upcoming
work trip or a holiday trip bundles has got you covered you can go into trips
and see all of the emails associated with a specific trip Google scans your
emails and automatically figures out what emails are part of which trip this
is great when you're actually on your trip and quickly need access to your
hotel reservation or your car rental all of these confirmation emails are there
automatically in one place the same goes for purchases you can easily search for
receipts and your online purchases just go to the search bar type the item
you're searching for and then type in : purchases that way Google isn't
scrubbing all of your promotional emails from vendors when it's looking for
things you've purchased bundles are fundamental to how you work within inbox
and they make email so much more bearable inbox was supposed to be the
testing ground for brand new cutting-edge features from Google now
some may argue that inbox has served its role it served its purpose it's done its
job because Google has brought a lot of the features that were
debuted on inbox into Gmail but I'd argue that it's premature to kill off
inbox when Gmail isn't even up to parity in terms of features with the experience
you get on inbox I think there is value in having a playground for Google to do
its googly I'm going to change the world one bundle at a time type of features
and unfortunately they just killed their testing ground for email when they
announced that they're killing off inbox and I for one am bummed that inbox will
join other Google applications in the ever-expanding Google graveyard well
thanks for watching this video if you liked this video please be sure to give
us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel for more videos about Google
products like this one also you can find a readable version of what we've gone
over in this video in the form of a blog post on our new website 6 - months -
later calm also be sure to let me know what you think of Inbox
in the comments below are you a user of inbox do you like inbox don't care
prefer Gmail let me know in the comments below well thanks again so much for
watching until next time I'm Josh Tedder for 6 months later