Google is discontinuing Inbox
This is really unfortunate. Inbox&#x27;s primary differentiator was never in any one individual feature like Snooze or Smart Reply. No, the real value of Inbox was that its design was built around a fundamentally different philosophy on what email is and how it should be managed.<p>Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever. It doesn&#x27;t really make any assumptions about your workflow, it just gives you a bunch of fairly standard email client features and leaves it up to you how you use them.<p>Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption. Emails come in and get sorted into categories, then you go through that list triage them, marking emails that require no action as done, pinning the ones you want to deal with soon, and snoozing the ones you want to come back to later. You can even attach reminders to emails so you don&#x27;t forget what task they represent. When you&#x27;re done you hit the sweep button and everything that isn&#x27;t pinned or snoozed gets wiped clean.<p>As a result of this workflow, emails you&#x27;ve already dealt with are hidden away in the &quot;done&quot; folder, leaving only emails in your inbox which represent reminders or tasks you have yet to complete. You can even add custom reminders to Inbox which aren&#x27;t tied to any specific email. Basically it turns your inbox into a to-do list.<p>I&#x27;m saddened to see Inbox go. Gmail doesn&#x27;t really capture this workflow with quite the same level of elegance Inbox does; it just wasn&#x27;t designed to work that way. I suspect that long after Inbox is gone I&#x27;ll still find myself using the workflow it taught me; treating my inbox like a to-do list even when the client I use is no longer built around that workflow.