R.I.P., Google Inbox (Premium)

Today’s the day: Google is killing off Inbox, its simpler interface for Gmail. But instead of addressing this, Google is today celebrating Gmail. Which is terrible.

And yeah. I’m still upset about this.

As you may recall, Google announced in September that it would kill off Inbox on March 31, 2019. That was yesterday, but as of this writing, the Inbox service on the web is still working. (Inbox is no longer available via the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, but I can’t test whether the mobile app is still working since I’ve uninstalled it from my devices.)

Google claimed at the time that it had “learned a lot about how to make email better” thanks to four years of Inbox availability, and that it had added “popular Inbox experiences” to Gmail. As such, maintaining two Gmail interfaces no longer made sense.

That is incorrect.

Inbox wasn’t superior to Gmail because of some individual “Inbox experiences.” Inbox was—still is—vastly superior to Gmail because of the whole of the experience, the combination of experiences that together made/make Inbox exactly what I was looking for. In the same way that the convoluted, overly-busy, and creeping functionality of Gmail makes it exactly what I’m not looking for. It is very clear that Google’s goal for Gmail was to make it the functional equivalent of the equally-terrible Microsoft Outlook desktop client.

Well, congratulations, Google. You succeeded. Gmail on the web is just as top-heavy and complex as desktop Outlook. It’s just as terrible. You did it.

(Irony alert: The mobile versions of Gmail and Outlook are both terrific. I suspect that the reduced on-screen real estate available to the mobile clients played a big role in making these apps both simpler looking and simpler to use. Whereas with the virtually unlimited area available on the web/desktop, the apps just grew out of control.)

As such, I wrote in September that I would not be using Gmail for the reasons cited above.

But then something interesting happened. In evaluating Gmail alternatives on both web (desktop) and mobile, I started, quite naturally, with Microsoft’s email products, Outlook.com (web/desktop) and Outlook Mobile. As noted, the latter is a terrific client, and I’ve since decided to stick with it: Outlook Mobile is now my choice for email on the go.

But I also found issues with using a web client of any kind for email on the desktop. If I wasn’t so pissed off at Google right now, I guess I’d thank them for this. As it turns out, aggregating separate email accounts at the cloud/service level is not necessarily the right approach. That is, instead of forwarding email from account to account, which I’d been doing for years, it’s better to keep the email where it originated and use a single email app to aggregate, or combine, all of the email from multiple accounts in a single place. In other words, don’t move the email around. Just view it—and manage it—from a single place.

“What this means—and it’s a bitter pill for me to swallow—is that I might be better off keeping each email account separate, with no forwarding,” I wrote at the time. “And for simplicity’s sake, [one should] use an email client that will poll each account and optionally display the messages from each in a single view.”

The reason for this is that I was losing emails. Whether that’s because of the multiple levels of spam filtering that occurs when you forward email from service to service is unclear. I certainly did note that Gmail, in particular, was weird about forwarded email that appeared to be “similar to other email you regularly receive,” when, in fact, that kind of email should be less scrutinized. But whatever the reason, not aggregating email messages in the cloud is the right approach. And that was a major kick to the gut for someone who had been doing that for years.

More pragmatically, it also means that I cannot actually use any Google or Microsoft web client. To do so, I would have to forward all my other email there, which I just discovered was inefficient and even dangerous, and then configure the client I did choose to be able to send and receive email on behalf of my other accounts (which works fine). Put more simply, I would have to switch to a rich, native email client on the desktop.

Where there are no good choices.

Look, I’m a Windows guy. And that means that Microsoft will always be my first choice. But when it comes to the desktop, Microsoft no longer makes any email client that makes any sense at all. (Can I kindly get a moment of silence for Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail?) In fact, it now makes two extreme email clients, both of them terrible. Windows Mail, which ships with Windows 10, is extremely simplistic—the bad kind—and doesn’t even offer basic features that any email client should have. And Microsoft Outlook, as noted, is extreme in the opposite direction. It’s as terrible as terrible can be with its complex, overwrought interface that piled up over the years like strata in an archeological dig.

Let me be a bit more specific.

The biggest issue I have with Windows Mail is that this Playskool-like app doesn’t allow you to configure the size of the fonts used to display email messages. Instead, the entire app uses your system setting to determine how text is displayed, whether it’s in the user interface or in the messages you’re reading.

Yes, you can “zoom” the view of an email message (and you can even do so with your fingers on a touch-based display). But this zooming capability doesn’t respect the boundaries of the Reading pane. So as you zoom, the edges of the message will extend beyond the edges of view. So it’s stupid. And it’s not a setting. If you can’t easily read messages, you will have to re-zoom each one (and scroll around to see it all).

Over time, Microsoft has made a few small changes to Mail that suggest it sort of understands the issue. You can now configure the display spacing of the Folder and Messages panes, which helps them look better at different resolutions and display densities, albeit manually. And in Windows 10 version 1903, Microsoft is adding a Default Font setting that I was initially excited about.  Unfortunately, that is only for outgoing email messages. Not all email messages.

Oh, Microsoft.

And then there’s the full-blown (one might say overblown) Outlook desktop client which, on Windows at least, is perhaps the biggest pig of a program I’ve ever tried to use. Outlook is terrible in every way imaginable, and if there is an Office application less well suited to the ribbon, I’ve never seen it. In the good news department, Microsoft has tried to fix the look and feel of Outlook with a simplified view that consists of a collapsed ribbon with a minimum number of tabs, and you can further simplify things by hiding or collapsing other views, like the Folder pane. But Outlook is still a battleship, not a svelte little speedboat. And the sheer weight of this thing—seriously, is there a worse first-time sync experience anywhere?—just scuttles the whole experience. You can almost literally feel the weight of its decades of feature build-up.

Worse and more fatally—for me, at least—Outlook, which was initially designed as a MAPI email application that literally knew nothing about Internet email—is unusable as a Gmail client. And by “unusable,” I don’t mean “inefficient” or “somewhat slow.” I literally mean unusable. And this is something even Outlook’s supporters—and yes, there out there, no need to chime in—will agree to. No matter your feelings about Outlook, if you use Gmail, you cannot use Outlook.

And I do use Gmail. Twice, really. My primary account, for [email protected], is a G Suite account, thanks to my corporate parent. And I have a personal Gmail account as well. So two of the three email accounts I access are Google-based. I cannot use Outlook, no matter my other issues with this terrible product.

(Have I mentioned how terrible Outlook is? I’d really like to drive home that point. It’s terrible.)

All this left me at an impasse. What I wanted—what I still want—is that perfect, Goldilocks “just right” email client. Something that sits in the middle of Windows Mail, which is about as sophisticated as finger painting, and Microsoft Outlook, which is about as complex as the dashboard in a typical commercial airplane cabin.

One solution I did find (and recommend), called Postbox, is promising. It’s so promising that I even paid for it already. It’s a bit Mac-like from a look and feel perspective. But it is nearly infinitely customizable, which I like because it can be made to look minimalistic and simple. I had pretty much decided to just use Postbox, and had installed it everywhere.

But there are little, niggling issues. In keeping with my Mail and Outlook complaints, I’ll just highlight the biggest one: When I get Google-based calendar invites, which happens very often because, again, my workplace has standardized on G Suite, they come through as attachments that I cannot view or act on in Postbox. So when that happens, and it happens a lot, I need to load up Gmail or (for now) Inbox, and then accept or reject them from there.

And … no.

For now, I’ve decided to just suck it up and use Windows Mail in Windows 10, despite the font issues. No, it’s not perfect, far from it.

But it respects the system theme, which is nice—I like to use the Dark app mode—and it can handle those calendar invites. Sticking with a native app has helped me move past my Chrome reliance too, since I can use the Windows Calendar app as well, which works fine, eliminating yet another Chrome-based web app. (Removing the need for Chrome is like removing the need for caffeine in the morning. It works fine when you’re doing it, but you sort of vaguely understand that maybe it’s not the healthiest relationship.) It has some non-learnable keyboard shortcuts, so I looked them up. It’s … OK.

Honestly, this is what using technology is like most of time, isn’t it? We may have some ideal for what’s right, or ideal, or whatever. But we compromise. Twitter and Facebook are like this: I hate both of these services, just hate them. But … I can’t leave either for various reasons, so we’re stuck with each other. That’s what Windows Mail is. I hate it. And … I’m using it. I resent both it and myself somewhat as a result.

But then that’s why Inbox was so special. Magical, really.

Inbox mapped exactly to what I was looking for in email. A simple, minimalist view. Quick access to email triaging, where I need to archive or delete anything I’m done with. Plus, the obvious features, like replying and so on. It was just perfect. That Google would kill this product without offering an Inbox-like view in Gmail is beyond tragic. It’s almost criminal.

Google claims otherwise. Google says that it has made all kinds of improvements since it announced the death of Inbox. It cleaned up the UI on both web and mobile. It enhanced Gmail’s add-on capabilities. It added a centralized inbox on mobile. It improved the Gmail context menu. It is adding AMP-based dynamic email functionality. And today it announced several new features tied to Gmail’s 15th anniversary.

Ah yes. Gmail’s anniversary. Also Inbox’s anniversary, by the way.

It is galling to me that Google is not addressing Inbox’s demise today. That it is celebrating this overwrought piece of crap called Gmail and is not in any way explaining how it will make things right for those who valued what made Inbox so special. If you look at Google’s Gmail post, you’ll see that the word “inbox” appears six times, which makes sense because Gmail is an email service. But never once does it address Inbox, or its passing.

Rest in peace, Inbox. I won’t forget you. Nor, I suspect, will many others.