Look, email is awful. It’s a mess. It’s overwhelming. It’s a shame spiral of things you should do, replies you should send, meetings you should attend and memos you should read all commingled with flight information, daily deals, newsletters, purchase confirmations, spam, and inspirational messages from an elderly “aunt” whose actual relation escapes you. That’s why today, Google’s Gmail team is releasing a new app to help manage all that. It’s called Inbox, and essentially it sorts your mail for you the same way a personal assistant might.
Inbox automatically categorizes your incoming messages into “Bundles,” which are broken out into things like Travel, Purchases, and Social. (They tend to be similar to some of the categories that Gmail has been pulling out for the last year or so.) You can also create your own Bundles from tags, or by grouping messages into Bundles. That’s nice, but it’s not really that different.
What’s very new is the concept of Highlights. Let’s say you get an email with a flight confirmation. Often, the information you need to know the most will be buried below a bunch of introductory text. Inbox will dive into your messages and pull out the important information so it can put your flight times at the top of the message. And even better, it updates that information based on things like gate changes and flight delays. It does the same kind of thing with purchases, showing shipping information, for example. If you’ve used Google Now, it’s similar to that. It also pulls things like documents, pictures, and other sorts of vital information from the middle of emails, up to the top of the app.
Another very cool feature is the ability to snooze actions and emails. For example, if an email comes in that you can’t (or don’t want to) act on until you get to your desk at work, you can snooze it until the next morning you arrive there. When your phone or desktop client sees that you’re at a location you’ve identified, at the time you’ve specified, it will resurface the message. Inbox also has Reminders, and can even do things like find the phone number you’re looking for, or a website address, and bring them to the forefront of the message. To top it off, it’s got a great little interface. It comes out today on Android, iOS and for the desktop—and stays synced across them all. If you’re a heavy Gmail user, give it a shot.
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