Gmail is easily one of the most popular free-email clients in the world. This success is largely in-part due to Google championing motto of simplicity and connectedness. For the first time in ten years, however, Gmail is changing.
Inbox, a two-year project, attempts to answer the problem with email: too many emails. Although spam filters and tabs help remedy this issue, many people end up getting 100s of emails a day, and it becomes a chore to sift through and find the important messages.
Inbox, taking from the new Google motto of consolidation, seeks to remedy this by grouping your emails into bundles. Users can set up specific bundles as well, so they are in control of what they want to and do not want to see. This is similar to features such as circles on Googe+.
Most interesting, however, is the Highlights feature which essentially reads your emails for you and highlights the critical information. For example, if you have an email verifying a flight, the highlights will present the following: your flight information with real time status updates, directions to the airport, along with estimated time to leave with current traffic conditions.
Do not fear, Gmail is not going anywhere. Inbox is a separate service, which Google claims seeing users choose one or the other. Inbox does beg the question, to what extent are people comfortable giving their information away.
Signing up for Inbox requires users to license all of their information over to Google, that is if the user has not already. What is new about this service, in terms of privacy, is that the service itself is actually reading all of your emails, developing a profile and determining what is most important to highlight.
This service to many may prove an incredibly convenient form of organizing and consolidating the problem of email, however, the skeptics will always be cautious of the constant surveillance and placing complete trust in the hands of corporations such as Google.
If you are interested in testing the service, send an email to INBOX@GOOGLE.COM to request an invitation.
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