This is really unfortunate. Inbox's primary differentiator was never in any one individual feature like Snooze or Smart Reply. No, the real value of Inbox was that its design was built around a fundamentally different philosophy on what email is and how it should be managed.
Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever. It doesn't really make any assumptions about your workflow, it just gives you a bunch of fairly standard email client features and leaves it up to you how you use them.
Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption. Emails come in and get sorted into categories, then you go through that list triage them, marking emails that require no action as done, pinning the ones you want to deal with soon, and snoozing the ones you want to come back to later. You can even attach reminders to emails so you don't forget what task they represent. When you're done you hit the sweep button and everything that isn't pinned or snoozed gets wiped clean.
As a result of this workflow, emails you've already dealt with are hidden away in the "done" folder, leaving only emails in your inbox which represent reminders or tasks you have yet to complete. You can even add custom reminders to Inbox which aren't tied to any specific email. Basically it turns your inbox into a to-do list.
I'm saddened to see Inbox go. Gmail doesn't really capture this workflow with quite the same level of elegance Inbox does; it just wasn't designed to work that way. I suspect that long after Inbox is gone I'll still find myself using the workflow it taught me; treating my inbox like a to-do list even when the client I use is no longer built around that workflow.
> Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption.
Yeah this is a massive gut punch for that reason. Inbox is how I organize my life right now. I reply to myself, snooze emails for a specific day, track bills, all through Inbox. Say what you will about becoming too dependent on technology, but Inbox was really the first tool I had where I felt I had TODOs figured out, so that I wouldn't miss doing important tasks. This scares me a lot. Hopefully gmail is configurable to pick up a lot of the slack.
Web apps are programs running on other peoples machines that you have no control over. If you enjoy the use of software and you don't even have the power to choose to downgrade when you don't like an upgrade, you're in a very poor position indeed. You're here on hacker news, you shouldn't be scared. This is just another reminder that Richard Stallman was right and an opportunity to form a community to create a replacement that respects user freedoms.
Why whenever some software service goes down is there somebody chastising everyone for trusting a third party? That's how the world works. I trust the cities to keep the roads open. I trust the province to keep the hospitals staffed. I trust the farmers to produce my food, the engineers to inspect the buildings I'm in, the mechanic to keep my car on the raod, the police to keep my neighbourhood safe. Why is it when all of a sudden it's software, I'm not allowed to put my trust in a third party? I delegate responsibility for things in my life. I don't see stopping that as improving my quality of life.
If you want to maintain your own email server as a hobby, go for it. I have different things I want to do with that time.
You trusting a lot of _well regulated_ industries and government run services is one matter. Blithely grouping them all together at all, let alone comparing them with software, is another thing altogether.
Setting aside the comparison you're trying to make, there are a lot of choices you can make. You can choose to rely on a web app hosted by a third party to secure all of your data and provide you with a consistent service. I think time and time again this is proven to be the most foolish choice, at least if you truly believe the service will continue to be provided. You can also choose to rely on third party services implementing common standards (i.e. POP and IMAP) and allow interchangeable third parties to provide services while your day to day interactions with your computer are managed by software that you run yourself. That software doesn't have to be open source or free. When you have purchased a license tied to a physical installation medium you are still in a better position to control how you choose to use your computer compared to being completely dependent on whatever trustusoksoftware.com is serving up today. Free software is best of all, but isn't the only alternative to web applications.
Anyways, I will come back around and address you on your own terms after all. You can draw parallels between open standards and the regulations governing all the services you claim are nothing more than time savers. You can also draw parallels between the civic duty to vote and take an active interest in the health of your society to the need to push for open standards and free software that respects user rights. Well functioning societies didn't pop up like mushrooms after rain overnight, and they don't continue to work without constant maintenance (not mere delegation of trust to third parties). Software needs to be treated as seriously as everything else you rely on. Personally you can save your time and ignore these issues entirely, but you can't just off hand compare anyone concerned with the current state of software freedom to being a model train builder and laugh it off as a waste of time.
> Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever.
Not that long ago, gmail was a radically new way to deal with email.
1) aggregating emails from a single conversation in your inbox - yes, on the old days, every incoming email was a line in your inbox.
2) providing archive functionality - no need to organise and file your old emails, just click archive and use the search later if you find you'll need them
You forgot
3- a search function that worked well and instantaneously.
and you kind of covered it, but just to make it explicit- provided what was practically unlimited storage for the time- 2GB. Competitors were offering 5, maybe 10MB. I remember people hacking together a file system out of it because that was so astoundingly large for the time.
The fact that gmail is now taken for granted is quite interesting though, it really was astoundingly revolutionary at the time and really built the halo image around Google.
And they thread properly. Unlike Gmail's bastardised 'We munge your subjects and think these are related'.
I considered implementing the Mutt threading algorithm in a browser extension for GMail. It's one of those "If I ever have less to do, I'll give it a shot" ideas that will never get done :)
Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever. It doesn't really make any assumptions about your workflow, it just gives you a bunch of fairly standard email client features and leaves it up to you how you use them.
Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption. Emails come in and get sorted into categories, then you go through that list triage them, marking emails that require no action as done, pinning the ones you want to deal with soon, and snoozing the ones you want to come back to later. You can even attach reminders to emails so you don't forget what task they represent. When you're done you hit the sweep button and everything that isn't pinned or snoozed gets wiped clean.
As a result of this workflow, emails you've already dealt with are hidden away in the "done" folder, leaving only emails in your inbox which represent reminders or tasks you have yet to complete. You can even add custom reminders to Inbox which aren't tied to any specific email. Basically it turns your inbox into a to-do list.
I'm saddened to see Inbox go. Gmail doesn't really capture this workflow with quite the same level of elegance Inbox does; it just wasn't designed to work that way. I suspect that long after Inbox is gone I'll still find myself using the workflow it taught me; treating my inbox like a to-do list even when the client I use is no longer built around that workflow.