An Email Startup CEO Reviews Inbox by Gmail

First impressions from one of the makers of Boomerang

Inbox by Gmail is a beautiful, ambitious, often clever take on the future of email. However, contrary to the conclusions of many reviews, it is NOT an opinionated product, in the sense that there’s not a single overriding viewpoint that dominates the experience. And that’s where Google needs to do more to make it ready for the market.

Our Email Game is an opinionated mail client. By not providing any way to view a list of all your messages, it says “the best way to handle your email is to go through all of it in a batch, then not look at it again.” Gmail was opinionated in 2004 as well, with a narrative of “deleting messages is silly; we’ll give you plenty of space and an effective search function so that you don’t ever need to delete another email.”

After using Inbox exclusively for (admittedly, only) 48 hours on my personal account (it’s not available for Google Apps accounts yet), I can’t find a strong opinion that describes how it is meant to be used. And since it lacks that single coherent story, it is only effective for power users in its current form.

For those users, though, it’s a smorgasbord of interesting features.

Bundles are the most novel of these — an interesting combination of a “thrask” from PARC’s email research papers, Gmail’s labels, and the automatic organization that powers Gmail’s tab categories.

The PARC research that inspired bundles focused on message discoverability. They wanted to provide a better way for users to group together messages around a related concept. For example, if you were working on a new salad blend, you could combine all of the emails related to that blend into a single unit and see them at a glance. They called their concept a thrask — a combination of a task and a thread.

The concept showed promise. Users were able to more quickly find information related to the projects after time had passed, and they were better organized for the duration of the project. However, creating and maintaining thrasks provided a significant tax. It would be interesting to see if Google’s automatic categorization could have brought thrasks to life.

Google’s adaptation of the idea focuses on managing email rather than discoverability, however. They automatically group messages that fit into one of the Gmail tab categories (along with a few others) into bundles without further user input. Messages in bundles show up grouped in the Inbox as a single entry, which takes up about as much space as an unbundled email. You can mark all of the messages in a Bundle as “Done” (like Archiving in Gmail) with a single click.

Some of these work very well. The Promotions Bundle is fantastic for marketing email, grouping tons of noise into a single entry in the Inbox listing. Since the whole Bundle appears in a view similar to the one for a single email, it still lets me know that I have some new marketing emails without letting them dominate the view of my messages. Making it so that the low-priority 40% of my email shows up as 5–10% of my Inbox makes scanning my email much easier. And if I’m busy, I can just mark all of them as Done without even having to read them.

Other Bundles are abjectly terrible. The first time the Finance Bundle made an appearance, it grouped together a bill with a promotional email from a bank. So something very important (I have a bill due!) was almost completely hidden and would have been very easy to accidentally archive. Not every clever algorithm makes a user’s life better, especially when a single false positive can damage my credit score.

There are two brilliant hidden features in Bundles as well — you can create filters to group specific messages into a Bundle, just as you could for a label in Gmail. You can also, in a clever improvement to functionality we built in Inbox Pause, set up specific Bundles to only appear at prescheduled times. I think this is incredibly valuable, but discovery will be hard because it’s buried, nondeterministic, and requires a lot of configuration. If Google can express that functionality in a simpler way, it could be a huge win.

Highlights seemed like an exciting feature when Inbox was announced. In practice, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Every calendar reminder shows up as a giant blue icon that takes up several times the space of a normal email. Every email that includes a link to a video shows a similar callout of the video, even if it’s not the focus of the message. They make Inbox much less scannable and put the focus on the wrong elements of the messages.

Google didn’t hesitate to copy useful functionality like Snooze, all the way down to replicating the color scheme from Mailbox (which cribbed the core functionality from our Boomerang product). Likewise, Sweep is taken straight from Outlook.com, including the name.

As the CEO of a company that’s achieved 7-figure revenue in part from creating the first email snooze button, it’s disappointing to see a copy of some of our functionality becoming part of the platform natively without an attempt to partner with us. It sends a message that building on Google’s platform is now like working with Microsoft in the late 90s, where platform partners wanted to walk a fine line between being successful and being too successful. Platform issues aside, I have to give them credit for not screwing it up just to put their own stamp on it.

I find myself really missing Boomerang if no reply, Send and Archive, and our Send Later functionality when I’m in Inbox. I’m impressed that they included Snooze to Location, which we released about a month ago. I’ve heavily used this feature in our own product in beta for the past few months, and it’s incredibly useful. From what I’ve seen, Inbox’s implementation of Snooze to Location works well.

Other borrowed features still need some polish. Reminders are confusing — when should you use Snooze, and when should you use Reminders? Why are they separate? Also, every Google Now reminder that I’ve set over the past year appeared in Inbox, so I had to spend a few minutes swiping dozens of them to Done before I could start using my email.

On the other hand, having the ability to set a note that appears below the message in the Inbox when creating a Reminder is very helpful. Reminders also works well as a “note to self” feature — functionality that I’ve somewhat clunkily achieved in regular Gmail by writing emails to myself and using Boomerang’s Send Later feature. Assists seem exciting as well, but I’m still waiting for the first one to appear.

The Gmail team highlighted that Inbox was designed from a mobile-first standpoint, and it shows. Viewing messages is elegant on mobile. On the web, it uses an accordion display where emails collapse and expand within the list of emails. It feels like a bizarre choice, adding clicks in many cases and making it hard to just read an email. Google also moved even further in the direction of making email feel like chat in the Inbox compose experience, which works well on mobile, but less well on the web.

Overall, Inbox feels analogous to Perl. It’s a collection of clever, interesting, useful features, some of which have never been seen before. And, like Perl, there’s not just one way to use it, which makes it difficult for new users to understand how to use it best.

I don’t think Google can retroactively shoehorn a guiding opinion into an already-released product that feels like collection of interesting features. They were never able to do so with Google Plus. So as Google knocks the rough edges off the new features and figures out how users interact with them in the wild, I expect the evolution of Inbox will bring it closer to the standard Gmail experience.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Gmail has evolved to look a lot more like regular email since its release in 2004. Google added a Move button to make labels behave more like folders. Delete buttons returned. Threading can be disabled. It even received an Outlook-style Preview Pane.

But the advances that it made — message threading, fast full-text search, not having to spend time managing your email quota, etc. made email much better. They have become cornerstones of every email experience. I expect that will be the legacy of Inbox as well.