[freehunter]

My problem with it is that I don't trust it. Outlook does the same thing, I'm not singling Google out for this. Anything that automatically sorts my email for me, I don't trust it to get it right 100% of the time. And the last thing I want to do is a miss a critical email because Google or Microsoft told me it wasn't important to me.

Case in point: I run a website for my town and some user actions are sent to me via SendGrid emails. Not a lot, but maybe one or two per day. I've made the email subject descriptive enough that I rarely need to open them to know what happened. I'm guessing that because it's a mailer from SendGrid and that I rarely open them, my email provider decided that they weren't important emails and stopped sending them to my inbox. When I figured it out a few days later and went to check the other tab, I found a couple messages had been sent of people wanting to purchase ad space that the email provider had also decided wasn't important enough to notify me of.

So now I have to check both tabs religiously (in reality I just turned it off) because I can never trust that I'm not missing something.

[zamber]

The idea with whitelisting is viable. Use a [e-mail] email for these and then in the classic interface set a filter that will land these mails always in your inbox with an additional label.

Been doing this kind of categorizing with filters since I discovered the feature and never looked back.

[freehunter]

But then that's no better than just managing my email by hand. The whole point of these smart inboxes is to not have to do that.

[zamber]

In my setup there are no blanket rules. Only super important and especially annoying stuff gets the filter treatment. All the rest is autosorted.

[chipperyman573]

>then in the classic interface set a filter that will land these mails always in your inbox with an additional label

I've been using inbox for about a year or two now and this is my biggest complaint - you can't do a lot of poweruser stuff without going back to gmail! Once you set it up, inbox will do it (ex, setting up a filter in gmail filters in inbox as well), but there's no inbox interface of doing it. Other than that, it's great (it used to be relatively slow as well but either I've gotten used to it or they've sped it up).

[8ytecoder]

First of all if it's something really important you need a better notification mechanism or a separate email address so you can whitelist it. I primarily use it for my personal email. There's nothing ever there that can't wait.

[delecti]

If there's nothing there that can't wait, then there's nothing there that's urgent, so why does the "important" stuff need to bubble to the surface?

[Tyr42]

I think you can either add a filter for emails like that and say always primary, or just drag them back to primary and it'll (hopefully) learn.