Google's Inbox App is Finally Fixing Email

Last October, Google released ​a new app called Inbox to help users take back control over their overflowing inboxes. Almost three months later, is it working?

On Thursday, ​the company's official blog posted statistics on Inbox usage for the first time, detailing how users are taking advantage of the app. At the same time, it's a good reminder of just how awful our traditional email experience has become.

Available for Android, iPhone, and web, Inbox is designed to automate much of the email filtering users generally refuse to do themselves. By auto-categorizing emails into separate Bundles, or smart folders, Google wants to make it easier to deal with only the communications you care about, and sweep away the ones you don't.

Rather than having to scroll past emails from Facebook to find their latest Amazon purchase, for example, Inbox users can quickly scroll through emails that Google has sorted into Bundles such as Promos, Updates, Forums and Social.

According to Google's statistics, this Bundle system is working quite well. 85 percent of the emails it encounters are successfully sorted into groups, while just 15 percent are passed to an unfiltered inbox for the user to manually flag or ignore.

Also interesting is how purchases and package tracking emails alone account for over half of the info that Inbox highlights as important. Calendar invites account for another third, while flight info accounts for just under 10 percent. Studies sho​w that users are trending away from email and in favour of social networking and instant messaging for personal communication, and these statistics are a good example of just how far that trend has come.

In other words, most of the important stuff in our inboxes, according to Google's statistics, isn't from people at all.

But that's just what happens when emails first arrive. How are users are interacting with those emails next? Inbox has a Snooze feature that temporarily hides emails for a few hours, days, weeks, or more, and reminds you to answer them later. We see from Google's numbers that 47 percent of users chose to respond to a delayed email within a day or two, while only 5 percent put it off indefinitely.

Of course, Inbox is just the latest in a long tradition of companies—including Google itself—attempting to better filter our mail. While filtering used to be as simple as removing spam, keeping email under control now means filtering email along a content spectrum too. While spam must be filtered out, your office potluck thread only needs to be filtered away—and even then only for a while.

Mailbox, from the makers of Dropbox, has a distinct swipe-to-categorize function that shares many of the same thought processes behind Inbox. The Google Play Store lists Inbox as installed on between one and five million devices—about as many as Mailbox, but still nowhere near default options such as the official Gmail app.

Android is by far the most popular platform for Inbox, and is used by 70 percent of Inbox users. Google's web interface comes in at a distant second, with 34 percent, and iPhone brings up the rear with 28 percent.

Google's Inbox, and the me-too features it will likely surface in rival apps, could change the way we read email, and even the way emails are written. But can filtering ever advance to the point where we can finally use email as the all-purpose communications platform it once was? Google will need a lot longer than three months to find out.