Overview to Inbox by Gmail
Inbox offers a more productive way to review your email. Inbox still syncs to Gmail and has an effect on how email is handled there. Terms like "marked as read", and "archived" are deliberately phased out. Instead, Inbox treats your emails like to-dos. The app assumes that you need to do something with every email. Some are critical pieces of information you need to sort or set aside, some demand replies, and some inform you that you need to do something outside your inbox like pay a bill.
In all of those cases, "reading" an email doesn't mean you're done with it, so why treat it as such?
The Three Classes of Email: Pinned, Snoozed, or Done
With Inbox, you are given a few options for dealing with email. The three primary actions you can take on emails are to pin them, snooze them, or mark them as done. Here's what those three functions do (as well as their counterparts in Gmail proper):
- Pin: When you pin an email, it gets more prominent placement in your inbox. If it's something you'll need to come back to like travel confirmation, reference documents, or an important conversation, pinning it is probably the right way to go.
- Snooze: You may need an email but not necessarily right now. Inbox allows you to snooze it so it disappears from your inbox and comes back at a later time. You can specify a specific time, use vague presets like "tomorrow afternoon" or let Google decide with a "Someday" option for things you don't want to deal with now, but that aren't time-sensitive. If you view your inbox in Gmail, snoozed messages will be archived.
- Done: This is for when you don't need a message anymore. Marking an email as "Done" removes it from your inbox or visible bundles. You can still search for it, but it won't be cluttering everything up. In Gmail this also archives your messages and the functionality is similar in Inbox.
SWIPE FEATURE |
IMPORTANT: PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU SWIPE AWAY ALL YOUR MAIL:
You must commit to the Google InBox paradigm and be aware when you swipe mail away it becomes "archived."
Click here to get Inbox by Gmail and review highlights and videos of the features.
Partially reposted from https://www.google.com/inbox/