Wednesday, November 05, 2014

My Take on Google Inbox

For those of you who don't know, Google is coming out with a new E-mail Client for Gmail called "Google Inbox". Their promo video can be seen here. Right now it's invite-only.

I got my acceptance today and started working with it right away. It is certainly new. I am not opposed to new I understand this will take some getting used to.

It is as you would expect. Items are bundled on the screen, you can add new bundles if you like and set reminders to deal with e-mails later. You can pin e-mails as well, so when you're "done" with other e-mails those still show or you can switch to only pinned items.

Then there is this "Done" thing. When you swipe an e-mail to the right it is marked as "done". It isn't deleted, it's simply moved off your inbox. There is a section called Done that you can go to and see all the e-mails you're done with.  If you were to browse to your gmail on your computer, those e-mails are still in your inbox taking up space.  So, ultimately, this is the end of deleting e-mail. Your inbox will fill up to eternity unless you choose the e-mails, go to a sub-menu and choose to move them to the trash. For me, this is very inconvenient. I use "swipe to delete" all the the time on my mail program. I don't want my inbox or server mailbox to be filled with garbage that isn't needed anymore.  This is not yet a deal breaker but I don't look forward to having to visit my gmail and mass-deleting e-mails once a week.  Oh, and I looked in the Inbox settings to see if I can swipe to delete and there is no option.

All in all, it's pretty and fairly easy to use. I like the idea of setting a reminder to deal with something later or pinning it until it is dealt with. My method is to leave e-mails "unread" and right now I have 27 unread e-mails many of which I will probably never deal with.  Pinning them may force me to do something about them, or setting a reminder will allow me to kick the ball down the road a bit until I'm prepared to deal with it.

I am eager to see how it grows.