by Jason Snell
Google Inbox: Because we didn’t buy Mailbox
On Wednesday Google announced Inbox, which intelligently groups messages, highlights information of interest, and lets you snooze and prioritize messages.
We get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when we’re working on our phones. For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do—rather than helping us get those things done. If this all sounds familiar, then Inbox is for you.
If this sounds familiar, it may also be that it’s quite similar to Mailbox, a Gmail-focused app that lets you snooze and organize your inbox—and is owned by Dropbox.
Wow: "let's replicate swipes and snoozes, pick as close of a name as possible, oh and do a waitlist…" #photocopy https://t.co/vPiVaKPCiF
— Gentry Underwood (@gentry) October 22, 2014
Google, on the other hand, bought and killed Sparrow, a different iOS email client—and according to Sparrow designer Jean-Marc Denis, this has been what he’s been working on since Sparrow was bought by Google.
Today, we release Inbox by Gmail. It’s been my main project since I joined Google – http://t.co/FmBM7cfSbw pic.twitter.com/engP5VEfge
— Jean-Marc Denis (@jm_denis) October 22, 2014
As someone who tends to use his inbox as a to-do list, I think there’s a lot of potential in finding new ways of processing email. I’ve used Mailbox on and off (love its organization features, hate its inability to properly render some messages), and am looking forward to trying Inbox.