There is hope for your inbox yet.
On Wednesday, Google unveiled a new email app for iOS, Android, and desktop Web browsers, named Inbox.
It’s a more graphical, more organized email communication center that
includes built-in snooze buttons, attachment previews, automatic
labeling and filing, and intelligent search. For those of you who think
of “Inbox Zero” as some far-off Xanadu, this may be the thing to tame the unwieldy beast that is your email account.
Though you currently must
request access to the app by emailing Google, it’s likely that the
company is aiming to eventually replace its original mobile Gmail app —
and maybe even the desktop version — with this more sophisticated
solution. And, man, is it sophisticated, in ways that are not apparent
at first from its blocky, friendly interface.
It reads your email for youTo
begin, the app analyzes the language of your emails, and automatically
categorizes them into a few basic sections: Travel, Purchases, Finance,
Social, Updates, Forums, and Promos. There is a navigational bar on the
left for the sections:
Mostly
you’ll notice these labels within the mish-mash of your regular inbox.
That’s because each category has a unique icon and text color that
appears as a tag above your messages. (This is a godsend for someone
like me, who was never organized enough to create labels and tag my own
emails with them). Any email related to financial transactions, loan
payments, or stock options, for example, will be found under the header
of a green stock chart icon. Any reservations made with a train line or
airline will be denoted by a purple plane, and so on.
These categories prove to be
particularly helpful when Inbox evaluates the content of a message and
pushes relevant info to the surface of your home screen. For instance,
my recent purchases — headed by a brown shopping cart — are all bundled
together, with images of the things I ordered and their
shipping status. Without ever having to open a boring, robot-generated
email, I know that the candle I bought from Anthropologie is on its way,
and the umbrella I ordered from Amazon is out of stock. (Side
note: It is not lost on me that this kind of automated digital prying
is unsettling for people particularly paranoid about their privacy. If
that’s you, then don’t use this app).
Though this distilled
information might seem like no big deal at first, it’s invaluable
considering the way people now use email as a personal data center. When
I go to open my email on my phone, I’m not usually planning to casually
read through 20 messages. Rather, I’m on a street corner, mid-transit,
and it’s raining. I’m trying to find a reservation number, or an
address, or a date. This distilled information helps cancel out the
noise and helps me accomplish what I need to quickly, with less of a
headache.
A useful feature allows you to
preview multiple attachments underneath a subject line. It brings you to
the Craigslist photo or cat pic chain you’re looking for immediately,
without having to think about who sent you what, when. This is a huge
improvement from Gmail’s current app, which doesn’t even have a
traditional paper clip indicator to set apart messages that contain
images or files.
It’s Google, so there’s searchThere’s
also an updated take on email search. You can type in any sort of
normal human phrase — for instance, “Tim’s cell phone” — and the
specially tuned search will know to bring up any seven-digit number
associated with the name Tim (even if the word “phone” isn’t explicitly
mentioned in that email).
You can also quickly create a
reminder or compose a message to people you’ve recently been in touch
with, by tapping the big red + button on the bottom-right corner of your
home screen — a major design improvement to the tiny, pen symbols that
usually float subtly at the top of your inbox.
Finally we have the more radical
additions: options to snooze, pin, or sweep away messages, depending on
an email’s urgency and your energy to deal with it. So, if you swipe
left on a subject line, a box will pop up asking you to create a timed
reminder to deal with it later. This helpful feature, I assume, is meant
to solve the storied problem of the “buried” item — a thing you may
have read on your phone and then promptly forgotten about, because
minutes later you met a friend for after-work drinks, and sometimes you just can’t deal with it all.
Pinning, on the other hand, is a
categorical option you can choose after you actually open and read an
email. If you know the message you’ve received is one you’ll need to
access again soon, then you tap a tack icon at the top of the page,
which places the correspondence in a special pinned folder. You can
access this pinned message on your home screen by again toggling a tack
icon, so only your reminders and important messages will appear. And if
you’re feeling brave, there’s also an option to “sweep” your inbox —
marking everything as done aside from what’s been pinned.
Pinning, sweeping, or ignoring
But I’d say that this is where the app gets overwhelming. It’s unclear to me, so far, what’s important enough to pin in Inbox and what can be swiped to the right, and categorized as “done.” I know Google wants to eliminate the anxiety that comes with a little red icon that says you have 7,000 emails in your inbox, but I don’t trust myself enough to know what needs pinning and what can be swept away. Plans or conversations come back from the dead all the time, and having to choose which ones I deem worthy enough to keep around requires extra mental work. Maybe this is why I’ll always be doomed to live an Inbox Zero-less existence. And maybe at the end of the day that’s OK, as long as I have maintained my sanity.
But I’d say that this is where the app gets overwhelming. It’s unclear to me, so far, what’s important enough to pin in Inbox and what can be swiped to the right, and categorized as “done.” I know Google wants to eliminate the anxiety that comes with a little red icon that says you have 7,000 emails in your inbox, but I don’t trust myself enough to know what needs pinning and what can be swept away. Plans or conversations come back from the dead all the time, and having to choose which ones I deem worthy enough to keep around requires extra mental work. Maybe this is why I’ll always be doomed to live an Inbox Zero-less existence. And maybe at the end of the day that’s OK, as long as I have maintained my sanity.
I think it’s OK to ignore the
pinning and sweeping for now, if you want. Google Inbox is an excellent
organizational tool. Try it as soon as soon as you can. It might just
make you a more responsible person.
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