Google Wants Their Inbox to Become the Email System for the Next Decade

The year 2004 saw Google’s signature email program hitting the web for the first time. At that time people considered it as the biggest gift anyone can receive since sending and receiving messages and emails was becoming a daily issue. Nearly 2 years back, Google’s email team designers and engineers formed a team and they were thinking that Gmail was not able to meet all the required expectations. But now emails have started becoming tedious again.

Email is no longer means of just basic communication, it involves complete correspondence, and people are able to receive alerts from different social networking sites, airlines, online shopping stores. It is part of life and performs some of the most important functions on a daily basis. Email not only aids in file sharing, but also helps in storing important documents.

There are people who rely on email for keeping a track of their meeting, calendars’, task planner and even to make it their task manager nearly every day. Apart from performing all these important functions, there are people who might find emails at times very annoying. This is the reason which prompted the Gmail think to rethink about the concept behind email.

According to Gmail's product director, Alex Gawley, they wanted to build something that will be more helpful to people. They wanted to completely rethink about the total concept of emails and build something that will completely change the mind of people and people will rely on things which matters to them all the time.

The team worked on a program currently called as Inbox which the company will be releasing on iOS, Android and the web, but only on invitation-only basis. The Inbox is a long term replacement of Gmail and people shouldn’t be considering it as mere update. Although Gmail will still exist, but the team is looking forward to perform future works on Inbox. User can login to Inbox through the Google account and they will find everything that they had in Gmail. They are expecting people to use Inbox more than Gmail.

The Inbox will replace the Gmail screen with a screen with a similar line of social networking feeds. If a user received photos in the Inbox, they can see the pictures in the main screen and flip through them. The iOS version basically integrates the to-do list and social functionality. Google's data-mining prowess has been used for improving the highlights of this credit Inbox. Users will be able to create reminders and tasks alongside the messages received in the inbox.

The task creation has been made very smartly as it will be able to pull relevant information from the data stored in your phone. On the flip side some of the features are not fully novel. This will require users to use a series of gestures just to navigate and sort out the messages. One might feel this similar to the feature available in DropBox. Inbox can easily categorize your emails in the similar ways like outlook and Gmail. But at the moment apart from the invited people, others will have to wait to get their own app.