Google Inbox is a new (invite-only) tool for managing email

Google is launching a new email app called Inbox. But it’s not just a client that lets you read your Gmail messages. It’s designed to help you pick out the messages that matter most from a flood of email and do more with the data gleaned from those messages.

Inbox groups messages into bundles, shows highlights at a glance, and lets you create reminders in the same app.

Google is launching Inbox today, but you can only try it out with an invitation. You can try to snag one by pestering your friends (but not me — I don’t have any invites to give away yet) or by emailing [email protected].

In some ways Inbox picks up where Google’s recent updates to Gmail leave off. Priority Inbox for Gmail attempts to determine which messages you’re most likely to want to see and puts them front and center. Gmail can also automatically sort your messages into categories such as Social or Promotions.

The new Inbox app can do those things as well — and you can teach it to create new groups by telling the app which messages to group together.

Inbox highlights, meanwhile, gives you more than just a list of recent subject lines. It gathers data from inside your messages and puts it together in one page so you can see things like recent photos, documents, event details, or flight itineraries, among other things. Expecting a package? Real-time tracking data also shows up here.

That data, along with other things Google knows about you and the world, can be used for reminders thanks to a not-at-all-creepy feature called Assists. For example if you book a restaurant reservation Google can bring up a map to the location. Set a reminder to call someone, and Google will provide a phone number if it’s available.

Inbox is available for Android and iOS as well as the web, but you can only use it if you have an invitation.

via Gmai Blog