New Google features over inbox.com

I have been using inbox.com since from 2005. My friends were saying hey google introduced 20mb attachment that time i did not noticed the google new feature announcement. But i was not surprised by this announcement because i already knew inbox.com was doing this from long back. And again there were lot many features was released well by inbox.com which is google is trying now. But inbox.com has little drawbacks. The first thing comes to my mind is it does not automatically update the mail as it arrives. 😦 There were small small things. Do not come to a conclusion these basic feature of google is missing in inbox.com as a compensation they have lot more additional feature i think probably they forget these small small things.

Ok lets see feature wise.

Increased attachment limit – 20 MB!

I feel nothing great because inbox allows the 20 MB size attachment since it started. See the green mark in the below photograph

I was wondering at that time even google does not support this much size then whom would i sent a mail with such big attachment. Very few of my friends had inbox account.

It’s a Gmail party and everyone is invited!

Long time back gmail require invitation to add. Inbox also had the same. you need to have invitation to create the account. But inbox taken step in the other side now. You need to give your credit card information. It is just verify you are not a spammer who creating the account for some other beneficial. They will scratch 0.1$ from your account and your mobile number required. Too many restriction!!. Earlier it was not the situation. It was cool it asked me my mobile number. I gave James bond’s number (00000-0000). Now it becomes very strict. But now google is walking in the other side. It gives away to everybody. There is no point int that because everybody almost have gmail. You can see that in orkut network. Everybody is linked so everybody has the account.

Get mail from other accounts

Again it is not some great feature from google. I have seen it long back in inbox.com. See the screenshot , See the External POP3 accounts

Customized From:address

Which is again google said it now but look at the Your “From” address in the above picture. isnt cool?

Reply on top

Google says as the following ,

Inbox also says the same for every message at the bottom.

Embarassment-reducing new message notifications

This feature is not really available with inbox. 😦 When composing a mail reply in the mean time if somebody sends out a reply we can see them and update in the mail thread before we send a mail. This is really missing feature at inbox

Forward all

Google and inbox support from the begining

Chat

Forget this in inbox this is not made for that 😦

Lets see what else provided by inbox.com. See the attachment which shows the header section of the available feature

We have Email , contact, organized a calender program, Notes, Storage section to store anything, photo album maintainer.All together. We will take one by one and see what inbox provides and what google provides.

Email:

Inbox support folders to manager your mails. Ok, it is older method. But it now introduced with label supports. See the below

But it displays only the color and not the name. If you look at the gmail it displays the name thats good. But they work as same as others even in the speed wise.

Then i would take the starred message. again google and inbox says

<==google Inbox==>

Contacts:

Nothing much almost same. But i feel inbox has some real desktop application touch.

Organizer:

No body can beat google in this. Inbox all the feature notification bday reminder but it does not have in-place editor. But google does that a popup will be opened up there for adding and edit there itself and save there itself. Cool feature.

Notes:

Notes is the yet another feature from inbox introduced long back. See the attachement

It has the classification corresponding to color. I think there is somebody in inbox who loves the color classification. But that is not common for all they should understand. Labels, notes are classified by colors. You may ask google provide browser extension where i can add them easily. But inbox provides better solution, a real stick notes kind of stuff will be displayed like knotes and tomboy at linux and you can happily edit them it will sync with server. But it works only with windows. I have asked long back regarding this. Just got an auto responder message that we will do it. 😦

Storage:

Long time back i heared google disk coming, what happened to that? I thought google is developing something similar to this storage. Well in this storage you can store all your stuff and browse as a normal folder. See the figure

The advantage is you can mirror them in to your local folder. Then your local folder acts like a inbox storage folder. It is as like as iFolder and for windows users it is something like briefcase.

Photos:

I was trying to upload some few pictures in picasa. I was wondering google allows to add only 5 photos at a time. But that is not the case at inbox. If you upload photos at sync folder forget about everything, even it is 1GB just copy paste or drag and drop and leave it and it is faster than web upload.

Inbox also

Supports 2GB space

Shows status message

[Optional]Thread look of mails

Attach images files from storage

and some more feature. But still google rocks. So finally you should not do everything at a single time and deliver to the user. You should write only two feature and that should be perfect easy and simple and the users when get addicted to that release next feature or update on the same feature. You get a hit.

I generally use gmail for regular access because my friends mails will be floting around, 5-50 mails per day. Sometime it goes like mail chat. And i use inbox for photo album purpose earlier i used notes but not now and subscribed to few mailing list too. But one thing i was wondering is that there is no ad in inbox.com not even a text ad. Dont know from where they are earning.

As a end user i am happy by having both.