Inbox by Gmail: what replaced it, and when

Inbox by Gmail was a second mail client from Google, opened by invitation on 22 October 2014 and to everyone on 28 May 2015. It grouped mail into bundles, pulled key details to the surface, let you snooze messages until later and suggested one-line replies. Google announced its closure in September 2018 and switched it off on 2 April 2019, keeping several of its features inside Gmail.

Timeline [edit]

2014

22 October 2014 Launch

Inbox opens by invitation

Bundles, highlights, snooze.

2015

28 May 2015 Launch

Open to everyone

3 November 2015 Feature

Smart Reply

Three suggested answers per message.

2018

12 September 2018 Shutdown announced

Google says Inbox will close

The good parts move to Gmail.

2019

2 April 2019 Shutdown

inbox.google.com stops working

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google said in September 2018 that it was bringing the best of Inbox into Gmail and would close Inbox at the end of March 2019. The service went off on 2 April 2019. Smart Reply, snooze, nudges and message previews had already been rebuilt inside Gmail.

Our analysis: Inbox was an experiment that Google ran in public, and it worked well enough to be a problem. Bundles, snoozing, reminders and Smart Reply were genuinely new, and the people who switched said they could not go back. But running two mail products meant every feature had to be built twice, the corporate customers stayed on Gmail, and Inbox never got the Google Apps administrative controls a business needs. Once the good parts were ported into Gmail's 2018 redesign, the second app was a cost with a small and vocal audience. Google closed it, and the people who had switched had to unlearn it.

History [edit]

A different way of reading mail

Inbox came out of the Gmail team and was deliberately not Gmail. Receipts, newsletters, travel confirmations and social notifications were rolled into bundles you could clear in one go. Important details, a parcel tracking number, a flight time, a photograph, were lifted out of the message and shown in the list. Anything you did not want to deal with yet could be snoozed until this evening, tomorrow morning or next week, and reminders sat in the same list as mail, so the inbox became a to-do list. Smart Reply, which arrived in November 2015, offered three short answers generated from the message; it was the first place most people met a language model writing on their behalf.

It launched by invitation on 22 October 2014, the invitations became a small currency, and it opened to everyone on 28 May 2015. It ran on the web, Android and iOS. Reviewers liked it a great deal and a section of the audience switched entirely.

Folded back in

Gmail\'s 2018 redesign took the pieces that had proved themselves: snoozing, nudges to reply, message previews, Smart Reply, offline web mail. On 12 September 2018 Google said Inbox would close at the end of March 2019 so the team could focus on one product. The date slipped by two days; inbox.google.com stopped working on 2 April 2019 and now redirects to Gmail. Bundles, the feature its users asked for most, never made it across in the same form.

The domain today

inbox.google.com redirects to mail.google.com.

Sources [edit]

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Inbox by Gmail