I have been an early adopter of Inbox and I know that there are folks who either love it or hate it. I like it for a whole range of reasons which I will outline below. Spoiler alert: It is incomplete and is “in the works”, so I also have Gmail open in another tab in Chrome!

One of the most important things that I desire is the ability to scan through the emails I receive as quickly as I can, respond to the ones that I can do so immediately, but not forget some of the other ones. Inbox provides ways to do this that I love. So, here we go as to why I like it.

Pin and Snooze – Either when you hover over the email (on your laptop) or when you open an email to read, you have the ability to pin it or snooze it! Snooze allows you to specify a date and time when you want the Inbox to remind you about the email. When the time is up, these emails appear at the top of the list!

I usually snooze several low priority emails to 8 PM in the evening. That is when I can realistically get to them after I get back home, have my evening chai, finish my exercise and watch Jeopardy – some of the most important tasks that I don’t want to miss. In other words, I don’t want to set it to 6 PM only to see that it falls through the cracks. If I set it to 8 PM, the snoozed emails pop up to the top at 8 PM and I get notified at 8 and I can realistically attend to them. You can also optionally set 8 PM to be your “evening” setting so that you can choose this easily.

Pinning an email simply keeps it pinned and you can look at all pinned ones at your convenience and attend to them. In other words, it does not generate a notification at a particular time. I like to read several resources sent via emails such as the ones from EDUCAUSE or links that my friends and colleagues send me. I snooze them between Saturday and Sunday mornings and diligently read them. So, scheduling emails this way has improved my ability to respond to emails (which, even prior to Inbox, people tell me, has been excellent!)

Reminders – This is super convenient. When you are ready to compose, you can also compose a reminder right within Inbox. Better yet, it is fully integrated in that on my Android phone, I can simply say “OK Google” and something like “Remind me to send email to XYZ about registration subcommittee meeting at 8 AM today” and it will appear in my Inbox as a reminder as well as in my calendar. I used to save draft emails earlier to remind myself, but this is so convenient. Same thing as snooze, you can actually specify a time when Reminder should notify you!

Highlights – Whether it is Amazon purchases or emails from JetBlue about my airline tickets, they are recognized and clearly displayed in a way that you don’t even have to open the email. This again connects seamlessly to my Android phone’s Google Now, so I am reminded what time to leave for the airport to be on time. Only issue is, when it is my wife who is traveling and if she sends me her itinerary, Google wants me to start driving to the airport! They need some work here. Similarly, if I purchased something from Amazon, I am notified of the delivery of the package. And the travel and hotel bookings get into my calendar. I don’t have to do any copying and pasting.

Bundling – Inbox has this concept of grouping certain emails into bundles. This is not a new concept because some of the newer versions of GMail also do that. However, this bundling combined with the Highlights makes it very powerful.

Emailing or Storing Links – Another fabulous thing is, if you are a on a webpage and you want to share it with others, you can simply copy the URL and go to the Inbox and you will see a link icon next to the compose one. You click on it and an email draft pops up with the link. You can share it. Of course, Chrome itself can do this or many other ways to do this. But, when you click on the Link icon, it asks you whether to save it in Inbox or Email the link. You can tuck these away in Inbox under the bundle called “Saved”.

Issues – Inbox has its own sets of annoyances and issues. Many of us already know that not all versions of GMail work the same way everywhere. For example, I don’t have access to “Contact Groups” in my mobile version of Gmail. The same holds true for Inbox. It seems oblivious that the contact groups, once created and maintained, should be available across the board. Unfortunately not! So, if you frequently send emails to your contact groups, it can be a major annoyance.

Similarly, I use the vertical split pane view of GMail so that I can click on each email on the left and see the text on the right. I like this much better than the horizontal expansion. Inbox does not provide any such view.

When you want to reply or reply all to a message that you are reading and want to change the list of recipients, you have to click on the recipient list and choose Edit Recipients to make changes.

These are some of the reasons why I have Gmail open in a separate tab in Chrome.

Overall, I love the Inbox for reasons I have outlined and I sure hope that they keep enhancing it…