Battling the Inbox with Gmail

First off, gmail is a life saver. It is featured packed but also very proprietary. Things started to get more difficult when I tried to accomplish two things: 1) utilizing Apple’s native features and 2) a more adaptive inbox.

I am an apple user across the board (iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV). One thing I come to love was their togetherness, or what they call “Continuity” in iOS8 and Yosemite. This lead me down a rabbit hole of trying to use Apple’s native mail.app. This was an utter fail, mainly because I’ve become so accustom to gmail’s magic, their Categories.

I’m one of those that check their email before they sleep and turn to their phones the minute they wake up. Maybe it was building a startup and always feeling like you’re on always-on mode, but email is something that I’m wired to. When Google’s Categories came out, it was a blessing (not to say that it wasn’t difficult to adjust to). Prior to categories my gmail had about 55 filters so that I only see what’s important, no jira emails, amazon promotions, or linkedin requests — but when I wanted them they were neatly tucked away in some label that i never looked at. The great thing about categories is that it surfaces these inbox so that you can easily see them as line items in your normal inbox — showing 3 new emails in your updates category for instance.

The Gmail Category experience was impossible to replicate in other mail clients. I attempted to create filters that would assign corresponding labels to categories, but I quickly lost the visibility of new mail in my other buckets. Searching became rather difficult in apple mail (or at least I wasn’t using it right). A few quirks that I was never able to overcome made me revert back to the native gmail client.

The second goal was a more adaptive inbox. By adaptive I mean, an inbox that only shows important emails and can remind you when you need to respond or follow up with an email in the past — very much an expansion of the categories idea. Mailbox attempted to do this with the notion of zero inbox; however, having years of emails going through and clearing that out was a bit scary. This also meant that I would lose Google’s native features as well as Apple’s.

The saving grace may be Boomerang. With a chrome extension I’m able to have my mails reappear in my inbox based on certain rules. It works well but only on desktop — meaning I’m SOL on mobile.

So at the end of my week long exploration with few mail clients, I’m back to native gmail in the browser and iOS app. Maybe this “Gmail Inbox” will the saving grace…