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 mana...