While writing a recent article for TechCrunch about empty states in app design, I came across Inbox by Gmail — the app which rewards you with a sunny sky when you hit inbox zero.
Inbox by Gmail for Android, free and safe download. Swipe gestures; Gets rid of email anxiety; Google Now cards; Lets you act on emails in bulk. The app supports swipe gestures so you can archive emails in bulk with a simple swipe right. You can login from a computer, or add your account to the Gmail app on your phone or tablet. Once you're signed in, check your mail by opening your inbox.
Bonus: Get 25 Gmail Tips
Before we start, I wanted to offer you a bonus upgrade of 25 Gmail tips you can use to get super-fast at reducing your inbox to zero.
Just click the button below to access your Gmail tips.
Done that? Now, let’s get into the Inbox vs Gmail comparison.
Inbox vs Gmail: The Full Comparison
I’m probably a little late to the party, and as much as I love Gmail I feel that Inbox is a smarter and more intuitive way to process a bulging inbox.
Vinay covered why task snoozing is so powerful over on his Abstract Living blog, which made me want to try an app with the same mechanics.
If you’re anything like me and have these traits, you’re probably going to get a lot out of Inbox:
- Around 5% of your emails warrant a reply
- Less than 10% of your emails get opened
- You forget to create tasks in your to-do list from emails
- You spend too long hitting inbox zero (the very definition of ‘busy work’)
- You find it hard to separate useful emails from trash with your current app
- You need reminding often before you start working on a task
- You want to see a blue, sunny sky pop up when you clear your inbox.
- You like good things
Delightful, right?! It looks even better on the iPhone because it animates slightly. After 20 minutes of looking for a way to record my iPhone’s screen and buying some junk app which doesn’t actually do it, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
If you want more content on Google products, see the posts Google Drive Tips and Dropbox vs Google Drive.
But first, getting back on track: here’s Inbox vs Gmail (The Showdown).
You can pin the most important emails to the top of your inbox
In a similar way to how Gmail has stars, Inbox has pins. In my opinion, pins are more useful. While you could filter Gmail to show only starred items, that’s more friction than I’d like, and, unlike Inbox, starring doesn’t actually… do anything else.alt
A pinned email sits at the top of your inbox and looms over you, preventing you from reaching the blue sky until you do something about it. If you need something to be at the top of your list before you ever get round to it, you’ll be a lot more productive with pins than stars.
It’s not just that, either. Pins become exceptionally useful when you get round to batch archiving.
You can batch-archive emails in one click
While I was still a Gmail user, I was always looking for ways to quickly process all of my unimportant emails — you know, things like notifications you’ve already read or offers you’re only occasionally interested in.
In Gmail, I tried ‘select all, unselect a few, archive all, next page, repeat’. I tried furiously bashing keyboard shortcuts, hammering through my inbox like it was a fearsome beast to be destroyed.
In Inbox, you can click the tick icon above each group to sweep all unpinned items
Whoosh.
Snooze important, non-urgent items to bounce back later
Just like how Any.Do has a task snoozing feature (which has started running my life as of this week), Inbox has the same for emails.
You can snooze an email ’til the evening, tomorrow, next week, or pick a custom time. Snoozing essentially moves it to another category, away from your inbox, then bounces it back over whenever you want to deal with it.
Counter-intuitively, I’ve found that putting off tasks until later has made me more productive. That’s because I’ve at least ‘touched’ them. Leaving them as unread and letting them slip further down was something I was prone to do with Gmail, even for exceptionally important things.
While snoozing can be a good way to get a quick reminder, there’s a way with Inbox that you can create to-do list items from your emails.
Create one-click reminders from inside your inbox
Inbox is pretty smart. It parses your received emails for action items — things like ‘send me the images’ or ‘call my assistant’ — and offers you to add them as reminders. While it’s regrettable that these can’t be sent off somewhere like Any.Do with an integration, I check my inbox often enough to be able to act on them anyway.
The minimalist UI had me scrambling around for a while trying to figure out how to actually add a reminder. Turns out that when you pin an email, you get the option to add a reminder of why you pinned it and what needs to happen next.
Use smart Responses on Android and iOS
Last month Google announced over on the official Gmail blog that Inbox for Mobile would be getting some special treatment. It came in the form of facilitation for slothfully lazy individuals like myself.
When Inbox thinks that you’d be fine to fire off a canned response, it shows you three options underneath when you open the email.
I can only speak for myself, but this really helps me get around to answering emails I’d probably not reply to otherwise.
On the web version, Inbox also offers templates. These are similar to the canned responses on Gmail you can enable through Labs.
Click the plus, and then open the template menu. Inside, you can manage your templates: add new, edit, delete, etc.
If you find yourself typing the same emails over and over again, or copy-pasting a template from your computer, just add a new template instead to save yourself some time.
You can process your inbox at lightning speed, even on mobile
Here’s a demonstration of what happens when you swipe an email left or right on Gmail vs Inbox. On Gmail, swiping right brings up the option to archive it, and left gives you the hidden menu.
Inbox’s reaction feels far more natural to me. Swiping right archives the email, and swiping left snoozes it.
You can still keep using the Gmail/Zapier integration
Since Inbox is just basically a new user interface for Gmail, you can keep on using your Zapier integrations with the warning that stars no longer work. Stars aren’t a feature Google decided to continue with Inbox, so we’re going to have to wait until Zapier‘s workflow automation platform supports it.
For now, you can still use integrations involving tags. Why don’t you try these?
There are a few reasons why Inbox might not be perfect for you
While writing this article, I realized that there are probably a lot of people who are already deeply ingrained in their Gmail workflow that would have a hard time making the switch. Here are some problems with Inbox that might hold you back:
- If you don’t use a Gmail/Google Apps address. Unlike Gmail, which lets you receive emails from Yahoo, Hotmail and the likes, Inbox is a little more strict. There are, however, some workarounds.
- You’d rather permanently delete emails than archive them.
- You hate the sun and sky
- You hate good things
If I’ve convinced you to make the switch, you’ll have to download the Inbox by Gmail app for Android or iOS first. You can’t just go to it on the web (for some arcane reason).
Let me know why I’m totally wrong (or right) in the comments below and we can have a fight (or a hug). ?
Bonus upgrade: Get our 25 Gmail tips and become an overnight power user
Since Inbox is built on top of Gmail, you can use a lot of tricks designed for Gmail with Inbox. That means you can use this list of 25 Gmail tips to power up your Inbox experience.
Click the button below to get your Gmail tips.
Bad news for fans of innovative email systems: Inbox by Gmail is shutting down, less than four years after it first saw the light of day. If you’re a deeply invested Inbox user, where can you find the same sorts of features and tools beyond next March? We’ve got some ideas.
You might want to go back to Gmail
Google says Inbox users should head back to Gmail, because of course it would. Smart features like email snoozing, smart replies, and nudges—first introduced in Inbox—have now made their way to Gmail proper, both on the web and in the mobile apps.
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If you don’t like them, you can turn off smart replies (where Gmail suggests auto-responses for you) and smart nudges (reminders to follow up on emails) through the respective settings screens on the web and in the mobile apps. If you’re migrating from Inbox, though, we assume you want to keep them.
Regular Gmail now shows attachments outside of a conversation thread to, though it doesn’t work quite as well as the thumbnail previews you get in Inbox at the moment. There’s also no equivalent in Gmail for Inbox’s Highlights tab that surfaces your most important emails first (though the Primary tab sort of does the same job).
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You can’t pin emails in Gmail as you can in Inbox, or see emails you’ve pinned in the other product—Google suggests using stars or custom labels instead. Starred emails stay in the Primary folder in regular Gmail, so they work along the same lines as pins, but you’ll have to remember to run a pinned email audit before you leave Inbox to make sure nothing gets lost in the transition.
Gmail won’t automatically bundle emails into groups for travel, finance, purchases and so on either as Inbox does. What it does do is sort emails into tabs (including ones for social notifications and promotional emails), so there is some crossover there—click the cog icon in Gmail for the web and choose Configure inbox to pick the tabs that are visible.
Finally, reminders aren’t moved across from Inbox to Gmail. These remain something of a mess across Google’s products generally—the Inbox reminders synced with your Google Assistant reminders, but not with reminders in Google Keep (keep up at the back).
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Since the big Gmail redesign of 2018, you can have either Google Keep or the new Google Tasks available as a pane in Gmail on the right-hand side, but you’re still going to have to move your reminders over manually—these apps don’t share reminders with Inbox or Google Assistant.
On Gmail for mobile, you get some but not all of the slickness of Inbox: You can swipe away conversations to archive them, but this action can only be customized in the Android app; and whether you’re on Android or iOS, snoozing emails takes three taps rather than a single swipe as it does in Inbox.
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As imperfect as it is, Gmail is just about the best replacement for Inbox loyalists, as you would expect—it’s made by the same company, it offers some of the same features, and it’s likely to become more Inbox-like in the future.
You might want to try Outlook.com
Wait, wait, come back... the staid and dry Outlook.com has been slowly getting better and better in recent years, and if you’ve not given it so much as a passing glance since Inbox first launched, it might be worth a reassessment.
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You need a Microsoft account to use Outlook.com, but it’s free to set up and you can manage all your Gmail messages via IMAP—there’s no need to suddenly swap email providers. It’s fair to say that the Outlook.com interface still lags behind Gmail, but it’s much faster and cleaner than it used to be.
Gmail’s iconic conversation view is now available in Outlook.com, attachments are previewed outside conversation threads (a little like Inbox), and the new Focused inbox is an attempt to bring the most important messages to the top (a bit like the highlights function from Inbox). Outlook.com even matches the Inbox pinning feature, something Gmail can’t do.
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There’s no smart reply or smart nudge function here, but you do get an integrated tasks pane—which lists flagged emails as well as tasks you’ve added manually—which might be enough to replace your reminders from Inbox... or you could just keep using Google Assistant on your phone instead, to save moving all your reminders over.
Over on mobile, with the Outlook apps for Android and iOS, it’s a similar story—you don’t get everything Inbox has, but you do get some useful features, access to your Gmail, and a polished interface. You also get the option to snooze messages, which Outlook confusing calls scheduling messages (these muted emails reappear at the time of your choosing, and you can access them but not snooze them from the web).
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With the ability to power through your emails with swipes and snoozes on mobile, pinned emails and tasks on the web, attachment previews and more, Outlook is a decent Inbox alternative—if not quite as comprehensive as Gmail.
You could check out these other options
Unfortunately, the email client scene isn’t as vibrant as it once was. Email upstarts like Mailbox (which helped inspire Inbox) and Newton are gone, the promising Astro is now part of Slack, and Apple doesn’t seem particularly interested in making an email app that doesn’t feel stuck in 2010.
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What good options remain are largely iOS/macOS exclusives, so are only of interest if you’re already invested in the Apple hardware ecosystem. Spark apes Inbox in several ways, offering smart email sorted, pinned emails, follow-up reminders and the ability to snooze and sort emails with a swipe.
Thanks to Gmail’s IMAP access you can get your messages from Inbox right into Spark, though your pins and snoozes won’t carry over, so you’ll need to set those up from scratch. You’ll also have to get used to a desktop client rather than a web interface—Spark says a web app is on the way, together with Windows and Android apps, but for now you need an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
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If that matches you, Spark is worth a look. Its smart sorting works well, you can schedule the sending of emails, save attachments straight into cloud apps, and even collaborate on emails with other people. You get a built-in calendar, but for tasks you’ll need to connect a service like Todoist or Things.
Also on the table for Mac and iPhone users is AirMail: It doesn’t have quite the same number of features as Spark, but you can import Gmail messages, sort and snooze emails with a swipe, and generally get through your inbox faster. On the downside, the iOS app will set you back $5, whereas Spark is free.
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Airmail doesn’t include smart replies but it does have templates to make the sending of standard emails that little bit more straightforward. The app also includes an integrated to-do list, which you can add emails too, giving you a rough approximation of the pinned items feature in Inbox.