Here lies Google Inbox, a radical rethink of how email should work

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  Inbox's new account introduction. I did this April 1—perhaps I was the last person on Earth to see it? [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

We are gathered here today to lay to rest Google Inbox. 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. The scheduled shutdown date is today, and Inbox users will be forced to switch back to Gmail.

But we're not here to mourn Inbox's death; we're here to celebrate its life. 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. Preserved here for future generations, this is what Google Inbox was like.

Inbox’s innovations

When the Gmail team set out to create Inbox, it totally rethought how an Inbox should work. 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. (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. 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. 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.

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