Inbox by Gmail

Last Saturday, a friend from the Mauritius Internet Users sent me an invite to try the new Google email client App; Inbox by Gmail which features a redesigned interface to help users better manage and sort email messages for better productivity. However, when I headed to the App Store to download the App the next morning, I’ve noticed that invites are no longer required and that the app is now open to the public’s use.

Email redesigned

Emails play an important role in our daily lives it enables us to stay in touch with others, doing business, getting updates about your on-line shopping activities, updates of friends from various social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, forums debate updates and more come sprouting in your inbox every day. Sometimes it is hard to find the most important messages among all this mess thus, Google announced a solution to that problem in the name of Inbox by Gmail, which adopts the Google’s Material design in an elegant way and categories your email in predefined “Bundles”: Purchases, Finance, Social, Updates and Forums.

Inbox by Gmail uses a machine learning algorithm which allows it to guess which email is most important to you and in what bundle it should be. [1] Less important emails such as newsletters are bundled as “Low Priority” but if Inbox notices that you do read newsletters, those kind of email would then get a higher visibility. Obviously, you can add your own bundle for instance, you can create a Bundle for messages coming from family and friends.

Inbox by Gmail, the new experience

Inbox by Gmail also provides another kind of user experience, apart from seeing your mails being sorted into Bundles, you can mark inactive conversation as “done” in a single swipe to the right thus clearing a bit of the mess in your inbox. The only messages that appears are only those that are unread or requires a specific action by the user. On those messages, a single swipe to the left allows you to schedule a message or reminder for action at a specific time or when you arrive to a specific location.

For example, let’s say I want to reply to a friend named Kevin when I arrive at a particular location may be when I arrive at home. Inbox uses the specific location provided by my device’s localization features to determine if I have reached home or not, when I do, Inbox will remind me that I have to send a reply message to Kevin. Inbox is even more than a typical email client, it allows you to create reminders to help you remember things you have planned to do and reminders can also be set to places again based on location services.

Conclusions

Inbox by Gmail is a great email client App, therefore, I recommend those how have not yet try it to do so and to get rid of the now old Gmail App. However, there is one thing that disappoints me about Inbox; I was expecting Inbox to be compatible with all email accounts not only those of Google, this saddens me since I don’t use Google as my primary email service provider I instead use a Microsoft Account. As a comparison Microsoft has made the Outlook App compatible with all email providers from a Microsoft Account to Yahoo, Gmail and even iCloud.

[1] Source: Neowin

Regards,

Cédric