The most exciting news here is that they're iterating on Gmail again. It was clear that Gmail was stagnating for a while as they were investing in Inbox. It's unfortunate that Inbox didn't take off, but now that it looks like they're putting the effort behind Gmail proper, we'll be seeing continual updates and improvements.
In just the past 6 months we've seen native Gmail add-ons (that work across web and mobile) and now confidential mode, Calendar/Keep/Tasks sidebars, and Material look and feel.
It's more work for us working on the InboxSDK, but I'm gladly willing to make the tradeoff of some extra work for a more robust and vibrant underlying platform.
I've been an avid Inbox user for years. Anyone knows what's next for Inbox? Looks like it might be folded back into Gmail and discontinued as standalone?
I'll be real annoyed if they end Inbox, because I use inbox's Reminders heavily. I love having my todo items and emails in the same place, because that's what my inbox IS to me.
Google has said that there are no current plans to change or discontinue Inbox. So, at least for the immediate future, if you like Inbox, you can use Inbox.
Inbox didn’t take off? That’s news to me! It’s the only way I use gmail, I haven’t used the old interface since inbox was released. It pairs with the mobile app really well.
I use a combination of Gmail on the desktop and Inbox on a phone. I tried to use Inbox on desktop for a while, but ended up switching back as the desktop version of Inbox was too dumbed down and controlling for my liking:
- The mobile app arbitrarily doesn't allow labelling something and keeping it in the inbox.
- It puts emails in the inbox under a folder when labelled by a filter, which usually ends obscuring important messages.
- It doesn't have something equivalent to inbox sections (I use the crap out of these as my inbox has multiple different streams of things to action in it from multiple email aliases - personal, business, opensource, travel, bills, etc).
- As others have mentioned, Inbox is not very information dense.
Google sure had a challenge updating Gmail, since there's so many people using it in different ways. It'd be really interesting to see their top usage patterns summarised.
I built Streak's Gmail add-on (launch partner, and #1 add-on in the marketplace) so trust me when I say that I'm very aware of the platform's shortcomings :)
If you want to do something fancy then I highly recommend using the InboxSDK (inboxsdk.com).
But for basic functionality the add-ons are pretty sweet. Native mobile integration is huge, alongside massive a great distribution channel. Not sure if you've noticed in the new Gmail but they put a + button below the list of Calendar/Keep/Tasks icons that brings up the Add-On installation modal. That's pretty major.
I wish they'd just fix Gmail sync between tabs. Sending a reply to a message you've already replied to (because the first reply didn't show up in the tab) is embarrasing.
I'm not so optimistic.
New UI for me looks like an unfocused drawing of a child. What's more - I rarely used the webUI previously (prefer IMAP, which kinda sucks in case of gmail) but now it's slower and looks uglier... (IMVHO)
While I love the new functional features (Calendar view, snooze an email, add an email to your task list, etc.), the new UI has a lot of problems.
First and foremost, the "Feedback" modal dialog is completely broken in Firefox. The menu loads but then immediately disappears. It blinks back into view intermittently every several seconds, but I can't see it long enough to populate the form they provide.
They established a new dock for non-email applications on the right-hand side, but decided to leave the Hangouts interface shoehorned into the lower-left corner. It's too cramped to use and forces them to waste a huge amount of horizontal space to the right of the menu options above it ("Inbox", "Sent", etc.).
I count 5 vertical scrollbars visible on my small screen. The scrollbar in the primary inbox pane is there whether there's overflow or not. I tried selecting the "Compact" display density option and limited the list to 20 emails per page to guarantee that scrolling wouldn't be necessary, but I still have to look at the scrollbar. I also dislike that the inbox tabs ("Primary", "Social", etc.) aren't pinned to the top -- if I accidentally scroll on the inbox pane, they vanish.
Oh gosh, the scrollbars. The scrollbars are more of a disaster than before. I was trying to figure out Gmail for someone with macular degeneration who doesn't want to deal with screen readers or Mutt. Instead she stubbornly uses a magnifier and bumps the font size. It was impossible because Gmail's sidebar ends up taking over the entire screen, the messages pane gets squished into oblivion, and there's no horizontal scrolling. Indeed, there is still no horizontal scrolling for the messages pane, and there are even more things in the way of it.
(Incidentally, I tried setting up a screen reader as an ambient helper to wean her onto the idea, but Gmail's HTML client, which is the only thing that doesn't fall to pieces here, works terribly for screen readers).
This really should be basic stuff for a frontend web developer: the main scrollbar (the one attached to your root html element) should control the scroll position of your main content. No excuses, you lazy gits, we have `position: sticky` now. Inbox has this figured out, and that's probably one of the reasons I like it.
With a nearly "zero inbox" (only a few mail items, not enough to fill the page), scrollbar is visible for me in Firefox, whilst neatly hidden in Chrome.
Sounds good to me. Let me input multiple questions but only send one at a time after a response is given. (Maybe hinted to me later, not automatically sent)
I find it so strange that people don't find the bundling useful, because to me it's mind-boggling powerful.
Being able to open a custom bundle of Git commits from yesterday, scan them, then archive them all in a single click is huge! Being able to click on a bundle created for my upcoming trip and see all my emails for that trip there (hotel, flights, etc...) is such a time saver. Then being able to snooze those bundles to another date/time is also huge.
I actually want them to expand it more, allow me to bundle multiple emails that I choose together! If I get 3 separate emails about something I need to do next week, I want to be able to make an ad-hoc bundle for those 3, then snooze them all to another time together.
I can absolutely see how it's not for everyone, and I don't want anyone to think i'm implying that it's wrong to not want it, but i'm just amazed that there is such a varied response to them!
I've come to really like the auto bundling - especially for trips. Inbox has been doing a really good job of grouping flights and hotels under labels like "Your trip to Chicago". It also updates if flights are delayed etc.
Try making some custom bundles. I group all my industry pubs into one bundle that doesn’t appear in my inbox until 7am the best day. I usually scan the subjects and hit E to archive. Huge time-saver.
Let alone that the app is abysmally slow on an iPhone 5s. Even if your inbox (not "done" emails) features 7 emails and 3 new emails come in, the app doesn't even fetch them fully and loads them one-at-a-time upon opening.
And the inbox.google.com web interface does the exact same thing! It also gets stuck for several seconds when pressing "done" on a lone email in a group, showing an empty group for a while until it realizes "oh, there are no emails in this group" and finally disappears.
The app should be SIMPLE and FAST and it is currently neither. I am really thinking about returning to Gmail fully and using some other client for iOS.
Yeah, they seem to have hit all the features I liked from both. I had moved mostly to Inbox but things like mass email operations pushed me back into Gmail on occasion.
The Related Articles carousel at the bottom is responsible for a lot of that. In at least one of the tiles, it's backing an 82x45 thumbnail with a 2800x1556 PNG. The PNG is 6 MB, which works out to over 1.5 KB per pixel. Annotated screenshot at https://twitter.com/callahad/status/989119555711782917
What's worse, it's clear the CMS knows that the image is going to be displayed as a small thumbnail: the markup uses the picture tag and srcset attribute to provide alternative images, indicating that they'll be around 120 or 240 pixels wide, depending on device DPI.
...and yet, the actual file it serves is the same, full-resolution PNG in all cases.
Well, and the page itself is just hideously unusable. 1/3 of the space is covered with noise begging me to leave the article I'm trying to read. The top 1/3 is 80% blank space that keeps popping up and going away as I scroll, making the simple act of scrolling through an article feel unpredictable, as I'm never sure if I'm even going to be able to see the entire animation they want me to look at. Overall the experience of reading this blog is claustrophobic and stress-inducing. I almost thought I was on Medium for a bit.
Google shot themselves in the foot there though - autoplay videos are / can be disabled, but with gifs that's a bit more difficult and / or gifs are a way to force people to get exposed to videos.
> ha - that blog post is 26MB large and makes my laptop cry
Sadly that also reflects the state of the new Gmail. It's bigger and slower to load than ever before. At least based on testing I've done on a test-account given to me by Google.
(Which may or may not contain debug-builds, extra logging, instrumentation, etc. I'll not entirely exclude the possibility that the final release builds may leaner.)
Anyhow, needless to say, I'm happy with Fastmail :D
I had the blog post open on my mobile for the past day and this really explains why my phone was acting up.. It's gotten noticeabley faster right after closing it.
Gmail used to be good alright, but then it started to ask for my phone number all the time. I've switched to Tutanota recently, much better IMO, particularly the new client: https://mail.tutanota.com/
I would use tutanota if they could change a simpler domain.
When I wake up on the second morning after I've registered an email account, it was impossible for me to remember whether the domain was tunanota, notatuna, nonanuta or tutanote...
I just tested tutanota. The interface is clean and nice but the encryption to external contacts is the same as in Gmail (link back to tutanota and shared passwords).
Does it intelligently separate "promotions", "updates", and "forums" emails so you can focus on emails that are actually conversations? I used fastmail for a while and it didn't do this, and it was _so_ much harder to keep up on my inbox that I switched back to gmail :/
Interesting. This is the single feature I hate most about gmail. It keept misclassifying important emails and I missed deadlines for taxes, payments, etc. I ended up having to read "All-mail" to avoid missing stuff.
I recently moved my stuff to / paid a year of Fastmail. I gather Protonmail puts security features a bit more front-and-center.
How about the UX? Can anyone comment on how they like the over all experience of Protonmail as compared to Fastmail? I realize I could sign up a Protonmail account and compare, but I’m not sure I’d get a good picture of the service through casual use.
I like Fastmail quite a lot so far, but I’m open to reevaluating in a year’s time.
Lack of POP/IMAP is a big, major con. You're forced to use their web or native interfaces. They don't make this super obvious outside of an FAQ on their site. I signed up and then found out. I wonder how much churn that causes them.
I like fastmail, you actually get enough space & email aliases for a reasonable price. In todays age of $5/month 1TB of storage, charging an extra 21 euro a month for 15GB more storage and more no cost email aliases is a bit silly.
I also like the [anything]@alias.domainname.com feature. Lets you separate out user accounts into unique email addresses, and you skip the username+[unique]@gmail.com filter that a lot of places have now.
And the fact you can host a simple static website on your domain is useful.
Am I right that services like tutanota & protonmail don't support email migration? That's an extreme regression from standard email. Doesn't it make them largely useless except for burner account use?
Seems awesome! I'll be switching back once they implement the automatic travel bundle. I've gotten used to it a lot and it's been so helpful.
I travel pretty regularly, often with more complex trips than single round trip flight + 1 hotel, their bundling has been super helpful.
I also use it as my travel calendar. Gives me a better view of my coming travel than a calendar.
"Finally, a new confidential mode allows you to remove the option to forward, copy, download or print messages—useful for when you have to send sensitive information via email like a tax return or your social security number. You can also make a message expire after a set period of time to help you stay in control of your information."
No, thanks. I like my e-mail archive under my own control.
I find this a rather dangerous precedent. At best, it's an incompatible extension over what would be standard email and it further expands Google's walled garden, and at worst it sets up a false expectation of security, ending up as little as snake oil and possibly setting up people to dangerous situations. Nothing hints at messages being PGP encrypted (Or being encrypted, period. "Recipient verification" just looks to me like a way to get an acknowledgment of receipt) or even how Google disposes of "expired" messages.
Exactly. It is almost a mis-feature for bringing fake sense of security to their users, since receivers actually can very well take a screenshot or even a photograph.
As long as people have cellphones with cameras anything sent to them has to be considered 'open'.
At the same time, sending internal payroll information and such is something that can, and does, get accidentally forwarded.
This feature is less about "perfect security" and more about making sure the dumb-dumbs who work in other departments don't shoot themselves in the foot.
Awesome feature. Fire people who are blatantly mishandling confidential material.
I think it is to prevent accidental data leaks. A lot of information is accidentally leaked by people forwarding email chains without checking what is in them.
It sounds like another way to get people to visit google sites. Presumably if you email someone who isn't on gmail they will get a link they have to open in a browser, and unless you enable invasive javascript, you will not be able to view the message.
Anyone know how this works with IMAP? Does it just not show up in IMAP, otherwise forwarding etc. is trivial (ignoring the fact that you could just screenshot the message and send the screenshot)
I'd expect they will just send you link to view message in browser. So you will not be able to view message normally unless you use Gmail and that is probably goal of this feature.
Readit News
In just the past 6 months we've seen native Gmail add-ons (that work across web and mobile) and now confidential mode, Calendar/Keep/Tasks sidebars, and Material look and feel.
It's more work for us working on the InboxSDK, but I'm gladly willing to make the tradeoff of some extra work for a more robust and vibrant underlying platform.
Getting canned?
- The mobile app arbitrarily doesn't allow labelling something and keeping it in the inbox.
- It puts emails in the inbox under a folder when labelled by a filter, which usually ends obscuring important messages.
- It doesn't have something equivalent to inbox sections (I use the crap out of these as my inbox has multiple different streams of things to action in it from multiple email aliases - personal, business, opensource, travel, bills, etc).
- As others have mentioned, Inbox is not very information dense.
Google sure had a challenge updating Gmail, since there's so many people using it in different ways. It'd be really interesting to see their top usage patterns summarised.
I tried to create a basic app a few months ago and it is extremely limited and feels very much beta.
An example: extending compose functionality in any way is impossible.
Add ons are limited to when the user opens an email, that's pretty much it. Try for yourself and see.
If you want to do something fancy then I highly recommend using the InboxSDK (inboxsdk.com).
But for basic functionality the add-ons are pretty sweet. Native mobile integration is huge, alongside massive a great distribution channel. Not sure if you've noticed in the new Gmail but they put a + button below the list of Calendar/Keep/Tasks icons that brings up the Add-On installation modal. That's pretty major.
First and foremost, the "Feedback" modal dialog is completely broken in Firefox. The menu loads but then immediately disappears. It blinks back into view intermittently every several seconds, but I can't see it long enough to populate the form they provide.
They established a new dock for non-email applications on the right-hand side, but decided to leave the Hangouts interface shoehorned into the lower-left corner. It's too cramped to use and forces them to waste a huge amount of horizontal space to the right of the menu options above it ("Inbox", "Sent", etc.).
I count 5 vertical scrollbars visible on my small screen. The scrollbar in the primary inbox pane is there whether there's overflow or not. I tried selecting the "Compact" display density option and limited the list to 20 emails per page to guarantee that scrolling wouldn't be necessary, but I still have to look at the scrollbar. I also dislike that the inbox tabs ("Primary", "Social", etc.) aren't pinned to the top -- if I accidentally scroll on the inbox pane, they vanish.
(Incidentally, I tried setting up a screen reader as an ambient helper to wean her onto the idea, but Gmail's HTML client, which is the only thing that doesn't fall to pieces here, works terribly for screen readers).
This really should be basic stuff for a frontend web developer: the main scrollbar (the one attached to your root html element) should control the scroll position of your main content. No excuses, you lazy gits, we have `position: sticky` now. Inbox has this figured out, and that's probably one of the reasons I like it.
It's so boring to ask two questions and get a reply to one or ask someone to choose one of two options and they reply with "Yes, go ahead".
That would explain the lack of updates on the Inbox iOS App (which still doesn't have proper iPhone X support)?
The feature I use most in Inbox is the quick "mark done" which removes the mail from sight but allows searching for it later.
The automatic bundling is not bad but not terribly useful.
Being able to open a custom bundle of Git commits from yesterday, scan them, then archive them all in a single click is huge! Being able to click on a bundle created for my upcoming trip and see all my emails for that trip there (hotel, flights, etc...) is such a time saver. Then being able to snooze those bundles to another date/time is also huge.
I actually want them to expand it more, allow me to bundle multiple emails that I choose together! If I get 3 separate emails about something I need to do next week, I want to be able to make an ad-hoc bundle for those 3, then snooze them all to another time together.
I can absolutely see how it's not for everyone, and I don't want anyone to think i'm implying that it's wrong to not want it, but i'm just amazed that there is such a varied response to them!
> The feature I use most in Inbox is the quick "mark done" which removes the mail from sight but allows searching for it later.
That sounds like the (ancient) Archive button..
And the inbox.google.com web interface does the exact same thing! It also gets stuck for several seconds when pressing "done" on a lone email in a group, showing an empty group for a while until it realizes "oh, there are no emails in this group" and finally disappears.
The app should be SIMPLE and FAST and it is currently neither. I am really thinking about returning to Gmail fully and using some other client for iOS.
What's worse, it's clear the CMS knows that the image is going to be displayed as a small thumbnail: the markup uses the picture tag and srcset attribute to provide alternative images, indicating that they'll be around 120 or 240 pixels wide, depending on device DPI.
...and yet, the actual file it serves is the same, full-resolution PNG in all cases.
This is a problem that the CMS should be solving.
As is using GIFs instead of actual videos. It’s 2018, damnit.
Sadly that also reflects the state of the new Gmail. It's bigger and slower to load than ever before. At least based on testing I've done on a test-account given to me by Google.
(Which may or may not contain debug-builds, extra logging, instrumentation, etc. I'll not entirely exclude the possibility that the final release builds may leaner.)
Anyhow, needless to say, I'm happy with Fastmail :D
This sentence is nearly always true, applied to websites. (The exception would be mathjax, and a few more things)
Gmail used to be good alright, but then it started to ask for my phone number all the time. I've switched to Tutanota recently, much better IMO, particularly the new client: https://mail.tutanota.com/
So I register bob@tutanota.com but forget to register bob@tutanota.de and anybody can squat it and impersonate me from the same service?
Not to mention they blocked my IP after registering 3 of the 5 available domains.
When I wake up on the second morning after I've registered an email account, it was impossible for me to remember whether the domain was tunanota, notatuna, nonanuta or tutanote...
Why can't these services use something like OpenPGP's Web Key Discovery [0] fetching key from https://domain.com/.well-known/openpgp/hu/hash-for-localpart and avoid links altogether?
[0]: https://www.gnupg.org/blog/20160830-web-key-service.html
How about the UX? Can anyone comment on how they like the over all experience of Protonmail as compared to Fastmail? I realize I could sign up a Protonmail account and compare, but I’m not sure I’d get a good picture of the service through casual use.
I like Fastmail quite a lot so far, but I’m open to reevaluating in a year’s time.
I also like the [anything]@alias.domainname.com feature. Lets you separate out user accounts into unique email addresses, and you skip the username+[unique]@gmail.com filter that a lot of places have now.
And the fact you can host a simple static website on your domain is useful.
Deleted Comment
I also use it as my travel calendar. Gives me a better view of my coming travel than a calendar.
No, thanks. I like my e-mail archive under my own control.
At the same time, sending internal payroll information and such is something that can, and does, get accidentally forwarded.
This feature is less about "perfect security" and more about making sure the dumb-dumbs who work in other departments don't shoot themselves in the foot.
Awesome feature. Fire people who are blatantly mishandling confidential material.
*Or image, not really sure if that works.
The email contains a link to a site controlled by Google which holds the actual "email's" content.
Forwarding the email will only forward a link to an access-controlled resource.
This new "remotely deletable" thing must be essentially a link to a Google controlled page in the form of an email.