The team behind Google’s new Inbox app did an “Ask us Anything” Q&A with reddit on December 3rd. The team consisted of a Product Manager, Designer, and Software Engineer and for two hours the team answered all sorts of questions.
Most of the questions were about new features or supporting additional email providers and it showed just how new this app is, it’s not quite ready to be your primary email client as Inbox only supports personal Gmail accounts. The Inbox team mentions they are working on supporting additional mail providers but does not give a timeline of when that would be available.
For email marketers, Google Inbox shares the same HTML sanitizer and media queries that Gmail does and when asked about email filtering it was mentioned that the direct marketing community would benefit by having a place for their emails within the Promos tab. They describe the Promo tab as

For advertisers, each type of mail has a dedicated place in the inbox, where it’s a first-class citizen – less likely to be considered intrusive or cluttering.

Each email message can have a label applied where a user could limit the label to only appear once a day or once a week. If email marketers are not going to give their users the ability to control frequency, Google will.
The Inbox team mentions they have seen no evidence that email use is declining. Google is adding new features to Google Inbox according to how people are using their email today. People use their inbox as a todo list and the team added Reminders, for mobile users, the desktop and the mobile client support the same set of features. When asked “Will Google Inbox replace Gmail”, the answer was “short term = no, long term = we hope so”.
I’m curious to see if this new app gains traction or if it will meet the same fate as Google Wave.
The entire AMA can be read here.

gmail • inbox • Industry