Inboxer 1.0.0 is out!

Unofficial, free and open-source Inbox by Gmail Desktop App

4 min readDec 30, 2017

New year is almost here and this is a great time for gifts! Here is my gift for everyone who love using Inbox by Gmail — new and fresh version of Inboxer!

In case you missed the initial release of Inboxer:

Inboxer — is an unofficial, free and open-source Inbox by Gmail Desktop App

In this post I’m going to pay attention on some pivotal features of the latest release and answer the question “why do you build your own client?”.

What the motivation?

I have tons of emails every day. Inbox by Gmail seemed as a good way to handle them more efficiently than I used to do with traditional email clients. Unfortunately, there’s no official desktop clients for Inbox. I googled for third-party clients, but most of them did not play well for me. After some time living with pinned tab in browser, I’ve decided to built my own client.

I’d wanted to build something with Electron for a long time, so that was a good opportunity. After digging in docs for a while, I opened an editor and start coding.

The first public release was in November 23. Users found some issues since them, functionality was limited too, but advantage is clear: application is completely free and open source. That means every user can report a problem, everyone can suggest or implement a feature — this is a power of open source.

Basically, Inboxer is just a wrapper around the web version of Inbox itself. The important here is that desktop application might be more convenient for plenty of users, like me. This application has some tweaks to make it look and feel native on every supported platform, keybindings will help you dealing with your mail faster, and desktop notification will let you know about letters as they come in your inbox. In any case, use it or not — it’s up to you.

So, amonth after, what do we have?

Release notes

I didn’t spend much time on coding stuff right now — that’s true. I need some rest right now, so I’m spending these days with watching Netflix, playing games, having walks. Nevertheless, I have a strong willing to complete something meaningful until the New Year and that’s why I kicked myself and finished v1.0.0 release. Hope you’ll enjoy using that!

So what’s new?

Brand new logo 🔥 You’ve already seen it at the beginning of this post. Since application is not official, Inboxer should not have the same logo as Inbox by Gmail does. The same logo would confuse users, so that’s fixed. By the way, I like this logo even more that original one ;)
Windows support 🖼 An awaited feature. Inboxer support macOS and Linux since it’s initial release. Windows is a bit more complicated. New release has some style tweaks for Windows to make application look more native (removed shadows and gradients, strong borders, etc)
Unread badges 🔴 Personally, I’ve missed this feature. Now you’ll have unread badge with count of messages. Pretty useful.
Desktop notifications 📢 That works exactly how it sounds: on every new message, you are gonna get a native desktop notification.
Tray on Linux and Windows 📥 You may close the application, but you always can jump where you need from the system tray. Nothing special, but makes it feel more native.
Bug fixes 🐞 Of course there were bugs and no doubt they are present in the current release, but key point is that some of theme are fixed.