My friend was over for dinner and we were talking about how much we love Zero Inbox and can’t understand the people with thousands of emails left unread.

She mentioned to me how much she loved Inbox by Google, showed me a few things she really loved (Trips, bundles, etc.) and convinced me to give it a try.

At first, I was impressed with features like the preview of top news stories in digest emails like NYT or Medium. The snooze was pretty sweet.

So, after 2 weeks of experimenting with Inbox, I’m back to Gmail and here is why…

I can’t drag a file from the bottom rail of my browser into an email. I use full screen mode on a Mac as my primary desktop. I didn’t realize how often I download then drag into an email.
e.g. right now I downloaded then dragged in that image above. I can’t do that on Inbox and with the amount of invoices and other documents I download as PDF to attach, this is a problem.
I can’t use Boomerang or other common plug-ins. I know that Inbox has the snooze feature, but “Send Later” is a way of life for people like me who write emails at midnight and prefer not to come off as too crazy. Also, something feels weird if I can’t use Just Not Sorry, which though in my control… Outlook is next up. This isn’t Inbox’s fault, but still makes it less useful to me.
The signature block doesn’t have an option to be above the text I’m replying to. This maybe my weird sense of properness, and I get that you don’t need to see my signature to know who sent the message. Call me old school, but I want every email I send to have a signature below what I write.
The UX of sending somehow messed with me a few times and that’s a problem. Occasionally, I clicked the check in the upper right to send instead of the button. But that seems more like me needing more time. The BIG issue I encountered was that for some reason, once you forward an email, when you then click “Reply”, it replies to the person you forwarded to instead of the original source. That’s weird and caused me to look unprofessional a few times this week. Luckily nothing too bad was shared with the wrong party, but who knows?

If the Inbox team is listening… please work these kinks out. I’d be happy to come back :)