Google’s new email app called Inbox has been littering G+ feeds for the last couple of days, with good reason as the newly announced Inbox by Gmail is a pretty great little alternative to using the actual Gmail app itself. Inbox basically takes everything from all your accounts and filters it all into one easy to use inbox, with pre-selected tags to keep everything organized so you can get to things quicker and more easily. You can only use the app with your personal Gmail accounts right now, so that means no using with with the Gmail accounts that are associated with Google apps, unfortunately, and you still have to switch back and forth between those personal accounts too. Inbox has been at this point “invite only” much like Gmail was back in its early days, and Google is now giving existing users three invites to hand out.
With Inbox, you can see everything that’s most important as the app attempts to feed you the priority stuff, and it’s smart enough to categorize everything out into the correct “bundle.” However, if you see a particular email that you feel should placed somewhere else, you can readily change the bundle that it’s associated with so it will appear in that bundle from the future. Bundles are basically like tags or folders, just with a different name. You can also create any new bundles if there isn’t one already set up that you want for certain types of emails. Once you’re done with an email inside of Inbox, you can swipe like you’re used to to get rid of it, although with Inbox you can swipe to the right to throw that specific email to the “Done” folder. Swiping to the left will snooze a particular email if you aren’t ready to read it.
Snoozing an email will also give you the ability to choose the date and time you want it to notify you again, giving you quite a bit of control over when you see certain emails. This sort of allows you to hide emails for later so they don’t sit in your inbox folder for all time. If you’re already an existing user of Inbox, check to see if you have invites to toss out, which you can find by tapping on the Compose button, then looking for the Golden Ticket button accompanied by an “invite” message next to it. Who is ready to use Inbox by Gmail?