My initial experience with Google Inbox

This past week I finally decided to try out Google Inbox. The feature that really drew me to it was the ability to snooze emails. This feature allows you to make an email leave your inbox and come back at some later date and time. This is a really cool feature and a nice way to delay dealing with an email until you need to. In addition to this it is really easy to create filters that add emails to bundles (labels). These bundles can be set to appear in the inbox or not and you have some control over when the bundles appear in the inbox. When a bundle appears in the inbox it shows up as a wide message, once opened you see all of the messages in the bundle. This is a nice way to be able to group messages; you can see your labels in the inbox in a compact fashion. You can also decide which bundles will trigger notifications in the android app.

After using Inbox for about a week, I’ve decided to go back to using GMail. Here are my reasons:

  1. The keyboard shortcuts in the web interface are lacking.
    • No keyboard shortcut to goto a label/bundle
    • No keyboard shortcut to type in the name of a bundle to move to. There is a shortcut ‘.’ to open the move to menu though.
  2. The bar on the left side showing the bundles don’t show how many unread messages are in the bundle
  3. When you choose to have bundles show up in the inbox you can select as the messages arrive, once a day (7:00) and once a week (Monday 7:00). I would really like to be able to at least pick the time for once a day and once a week. It would be nice to be able to pick the day on the once a week.
  4. I like to make sure all messages that I keep are assigned at least one label. The Inbox interface doesn’t allow me to see what labels have been applied to a message. This makes me very concerned that I will loose messages by them being archived and not assigned any labels. GMail’s search interface is great, but I really like to be able to find my messages by label.

If Google fixes these features I will give Inbox a try again, until then I’m sticking with GMail.