The beauty of bundlesīefore we dive into the beauty of Inbox's "Bundle" features, let's talk about Gmail's manual analog: filters and labels. The bottom line is that without many of Inbox's best features, managing email is going to take more time, more configuration, and more clicks. For Inbox users forced to transfer back to Gmail, it's going to be a tough transition. While Inbox was the debut of a lot of features that ended up in other Google products, there was still a ton about Inbox that made it unique. Gmail users that loved Gmail could keep using Gmail, but for users that wanted to try a new way of triaging email, Inbox was just a URL away. It was all your mail, contacts, drafts, and other information from Gmail, just with a UI full of new features and a new design paradigm. (I mean, have you seen the reaction to the comparatively minor Gmail redesign?) The result was Google Inbox: an alternative interface for your Gmail account. The team came up with a lot of new ideas, but radically reworking the Gmail UI would open a can of worms apparently nobody on the Gmail team really wanted to touch. When the Gmail team set out to create Inbox, it totally rethought how an Inbox should work. Preserved here for future generations, this is what Google Inbox was like. Many of the ideas and features of Google Inbox have been spun off across the Google ecosystem, and while there is sadly still no viable replacement for an Inbox-style email client, the spirit of Inbox can live on in the features it inspired in other products. The scheduled shutdown date is today, and Inbox users will be forced to switch back to Gmail.īut we're not here to mourn Inbox's death we're here to celebrate its life. Google's alternative email client was a radical rethink of how email should work, but as has been the case with many edge-case Google products, the company is opting to pull the plug on Inbox. We are gathered here today to lay to rest Google Inbox.