Email is one of those things that you either see as a necessary evil that consumes more of your day than it needs to, or it’s something you ignore completely until you absolutely have to use it. Anyone who says they actually enjoy using email is probably suffering from a digital variant of Stockholm Syndrome, but over the last year there have been several apps that have made the experience a lot more bearable. Gmail is high up on that list. Now it looks like Google is exploring ways to make email something people actually want to use.
At first glance it looks a lot like Gmail as you know it now, but with a few key differences that radically change how the email client is used. For starters, there are a lot more tabs to separate all of your email into. Currently the groups are Social, Promotions, Forums, and Updates. This version of Gmail includes Travel, Purchases, and Finance to the mix, with the same basic properties that the existing five tabs currently have, In your primary Inbox, you’ll see these grouped both in the side menu and at the top of your inbox if there are new messages for those categories.
There’s also a new Pinned feature, which functions exactly as you’d expect. You can pin an email if you want it to stay floating at the top of your Inbox, and there’s a toggle switch for when you want to see your pinned emails and when you want those messages to go back to their original point in the Inbox. This looks like it would be a great deal more useful than the current star system, which doesn’t appear in this UI at all.
Your emails can also be Snoozed in this new UI. Snoozing an email means it appears as read until the timer goes off, when it will then float to the top of your Inbox as an unread email. You can choose to snooze an email for a couple of hours or several weeks depending on your need, and you can snooze messages over and over again if you choose to.
This is not very likely a final version of Gmail. These shots are the result of Google trying out new features to see what will work for Gmail before making them available to the public. It’s pretty clear that Google’s goal with each of these features is to make email something you can better organize and manipulate to serve your needs, which in turn gives them a better idea of what information you think is important for Google Now and other services. Hopefully we get to see more than a couple of these features in the real world soon.
