I tried Inbox when it first started and I can say I pretty much hate it. It seems like it is a change just for changes sake. It doesn't seem to make me more productive in my inbox, only more frustrated that I can't seem to find the things I want. Everything seems jumbled and just is a mess. If they make it the default I can see myself actually going back to a desktop client and using something else for a mobile client.
I had the opposite experience. I managed to go through my entire 5 years worth of old emails and get down to inbox zero.
I love the snooze and pin features. The Android app is awesome. Swip to archive is such a nice way to deal with email, which (in my case) is 90% scan and bin. The web app isn't so awesome, mainly because of the lack of gestures.
Reminders added in Google Now show up in Inbox as well so I can be walking down the road and remember I need to do something tomorrow, and just add it to Google Now just by talking into my phone. 9 times out of ten I don't even have to spell correct the narrated text.
Inbox was the one single reason for me not dumping Gmail for Fastmail, which I was planning to do for privacy reasons.
I LOVED Inbox when it first came down, but earlier this week I switched back to gmail.
- I love the snooze and remind me later feature, but I absolutely hate their touchpad/scroll support, I don't understand how mails get automatically marked done when I am just trying to read them.
- The app is super heavy for my 2GB RAM Macbook Air(I have one for lightweight surfing at home), it slows down everything.
- The 3 clicks I have to do in order to read a single mail eventually got to me. Take for instance, imagine if I got a new mail, how many clicks do I have to do in order to read it:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y0tyqaualc7dpq7/Screenshot%202015-...
Inbox's answer is 2 clicks, one for expanding the 'finance' section and second to open that mail. Isn't my intent obvious when I click on a folder that I wanna read that lone mail when I click on it? After clicking twice for 30 something mails a day, it got annoying.
- Inbox doesn't scan my hangout messages whenever I use its search. I search my hangout messages a lot, that means I return back to gmail. I assume they will add this functionality in future.
- The reply mess. If you are responding to an email, it has a decent inline responding ability, but the moment you stop responding or move away, you can't come back to the inline reply, you HAVE to edit that response outside of that experience. I see no reason why that should be the case.
- My corporate gmail accounts don't support inbox, so it ends up me having a weird experience of constantly using gmail and inbox both
I think machines still have some distance to go to achieve more usable guess-what-user-want. Many ideas have been tried, but I only see limited success in a few use cases.
