The author's experience with GMail seems to be the opposite of mine. The new features for disappearing/unprintable/etc. emails sound like they're just going to cause annoyances while Gmail sorting things into promotions and updates is absolutely fantastic. And I use the "forums" tab too. This is the "good method for telling users what they need to read" that the author wants - that's what Primary is. This is the way to help manage the number of emails you get. This is the efficient way to categorize and sort the emails that you get. It's really not Google's fault that you've got 6gb of emails in the promotion and updates tabs without realizing it - they've been prominently showing you the new emails you've received in those tabs every time for years now.
Here's the feature I keep wishing for in Google: when I attach a file, it should let me rename the file. I want to store it on my compute with a name that's meaningful for me and to send it to someone with a name that's meaningful for them. Eg: I want to have cv_google.pdf for my copy of my CV that I'm sending to Google for a job application but I want to have them receive it as cv_tgb.pdf to know that it's from "tgb". Similarly, when I download a file I want to be able to rename it.
I have been using Google Inbox since the launch and I absolutely LOVE it. It finally solved my email problems.
- I have notifications disabled for all but the important emails. So I respond to emails in time and I don't keep checking my phone anymore.
- Easy to read and discard emails. Especially promotions. I actually do check them - once a day and once a day only and then delete them all.
- Social/Updates ...etc are neatly organised. I check them during a downtime and not often. They don't alert me.
- Organising emails by trips are great. I can find all the relevant emails in one bundle.
- Absolutely love the GTD features - Marking as Done and Snoozing emails. My Inbox is always zero. I use that as pretty much a task manager as well.
Overall, classification of emails make emails actually usable for me. I used to be meticulous with creating email rules and filters in Outlook so I get to the ones I need to and ignore the rest for my sanity. Now it's done automagically and pretty spot on.
My problem with it is that I don't trust it. Outlook does the same thing, I'm not singling Google out for this. Anything that automatically sorts my email for me, I don't trust it to get it right 100% of the time. And the last thing I want to do is a miss a critical email because Google or Microsoft told me it wasn't important to me.
Case in point: I run a website for my town and some user actions are sent to me via SendGrid emails. Not a lot, but maybe one or two per day. I've made the email subject descriptive enough that I rarely need to open them to know what happened. I'm guessing that because it's a mailer from SendGrid and that I rarely open them, my email provider decided that they weren't important emails and stopped sending them to my inbox. When I figured it out a few days later and went to check the other tab, I found a couple messages had been sent of people wanting to purchase ad space that the email provider had also decided wasn't important enough to notify me of.
So now I have to check both tabs religiously (in reality I just turned it off) because I can never trust that I'm not missing something.
The idea with whitelisting is viable. Use a freehunter+superimportant@gmail.com email for these and then in the classic interface set a filter that will land these mails always in your inbox with an additional label.
Been doing this kind of categorizing with filters since I discovered the feature and never looked back.
>then in the classic interface set a filter that will land these mails always in your inbox with an additional label
I've been using inbox for about a year or two now and this is my biggest complaint - you can't do a lot of poweruser stuff without going back to gmail! Once you set it up, inbox will do it (ex, setting up a filter in gmail filters in inbox as well), but there's no inbox interface of doing it. Other than that, it's great (it used to be relatively slow as well but either I've gotten used to it or they've sped it up).
First of all if it's something really important you need a better notification mechanism or a separate email address so you can whitelist it. I primarily use it for my personal email. There's nothing ever there that can't wait.
- Seeing things in the email list associated with the email without having to open them, like expected shipping dates, PDFs. I can click on those things directly in the list without having to open the email and hunt for them
- Being able to pin things. This also functions as a 'selective offline' - when I'm traveling I pin travel and other important emails. Or if I purchased a movie ticket months before I can pin that and easily press a button to retrieve it without having to search for it
One thing that worries me though is that not only is Gmail moving closer to Inbox (a good thing) but Inbox seems to be moving closer to Gmail...
For example on Inbox iOS there was a swipe down to dismiss email list or email which made it really easy to work one-handed. Now they've adopted the Gmail-style 'push into new page' which means you have to reach your thumb all the way up the screen to hit the back button instead of just swiping down on the email.
One feature that I use a lot in Inbox and that I hope will be ported back to Gmail are location-based snooze.
Being on a somewhat flexible schedule on multiple sites, I like to know I'll be reminded of an important email when I get to the relevant site, which can be unpredictable sometimes.
Inbox is great, no doubt. The recent update to the iOS app is super terrible though. It does away with navigation gestures (swiping up/down) and many animations. It also no longer has an iPad layout.
I’m glad the swiping up and down isn’t a thing anymore because I used to lose my place scrolling through long emails and email threads when I’d try to scroll and accidentally swipe out of the email.
The promotion sorting etc is awful. Have people never used email filters? We've had the ability to precisely design filters for decades already. I already have filters for the various mailing lists and forums I read.
I enabled some of the filters and it put an amazon update in with the spam so I missed my delivery. What else could you miss?
When the inbox categorization system was rolled out by Gmail, I thought this was over engineering and the average person wouldn't need this.
Fast forward an year later, I'm surprised how good it works. My inbox is filtered clean of all "secondary" email. You might have some false positives and you have to tell the system that Amazon deliveries go to Updates not Promotions etc. But I wouldn't want to go to the world before the categorizations.
Here's the feature I keep wishing for in Google: when I attach a file, it should let me rename the file. I want to store it on my compute with a name that's meaningful for me and to send it to someone with a name that's meaningful for them. Eg: I want to have cv_google.pdf for my copy of my CV that I'm sending to Google for a job application but I want to have them receive it as cv_tgb.pdf to know that it's from "tgb". Similarly, when I download a file I want to be able to rename it.