Google Hopes To One Day Replace Gmail With Inbox

An anonymous reader writes Three Inbox by Gmail engineers today answered questions as part of a Reddit AMA session. Most of the answers were tidbits we've heard of before, but one stood out to us: Google plans to eventually replace Gmail with Inbox. In response to the question "Do you think Inbox will replace Gmail on the long road?," lead designer Jason Cornwell gave the following answer: "In the short term, no. In the very long term, we hope so. Inbox is something new — that's why we're launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users, to which Cornwell replied: "They are not aimed at fundamentally different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users."

Comments

So what is it?

[guruevi]

Webmail is webmail is webmail. WTF is Inbox and how is it different from Webmail or IMAP?

Re:So what is it?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

It's aimed at fulfilling an Inbox Zero model, which basically just means it presents an empty or nearly empty inbox as much as possible. It's actually quite good at doing it in an intuitive way.

Important things stick around, unimportant things are done away with very easily, but you can still get them back if you make a mistake or change your mind. Or set a reminder so that it goes away now but reappears later, like a snooze button. Personally I like it and have not used Gmail at all since I started using Inbox.

Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide"

[davester666]

Well, people have been switching in droves since it was introduced. Only 99.95 percent of users are still using gmail, the rest have switched to Inbox. Once it gets down to 95% or so, we'll feel comfortable with removing the gmail interface because barely anybody would be using it.

Re:Who's their test group?

[ChunderDownunder]

(1) open gmail in a browser on work pc
(2) type in shopping list, autosaved as draft
(3) open draft email on phone while at supermarket

turns out you don't need an app for that because draft emails sync to multiple devices.

Re:Google engineers...

[Ksevio]

Maybe for simple minded people, folders are more like the office where mail can be filed away. GMail has something that's a vast improvement to that: labels. You can label your email the same way you would put it in a folder, but many emails will fit multiple labels and you can do that. Folders lack that flexibility.

Re:"Ultimately, our users will decide"

[i.kazmi]

Inbox works with your Gmail address (along with whatever other addresses you've added on using imap or pop). It is basically a different way of consuming the same content (ie the email that ends up in your standard Gmail Inbox) and tries to automatically sort the email into categories such as Misc., Forums, Purchases, Bills etc while not assigning a different label to them. Inbox adds the ability to snooze emails (so you get a notification to do something about them at a later time) along with the ability to create sticky emails which show up in a separate folder (for a lack of a better term) that is easily accessible. I haven't had a chance to play with it properly as I only finally got the invite a couple hours ago but I kinda like the premise and if the categorizing algorithms are any good, it might actually be fairly useful (obviously that's my take on it, other people have their own preferences/needs).