[sfRattan]

I never used Inbox as I never had a problem with Gmail, but how were 'bundles' different from creating labels and logical filters that skip certain categories of message past the inbox? Was it just that 'bundles' were more intuitive and obvious to set up, or was there something that made them more than a label plus one or more filters?

[eBombzor]

Yes if you look at the basic concept it is filters and labels on steroids. However there were some key differences which really made a world of a difference (to me). As previously mentioned, the bundle was inline and was basically a larger message entity. It jumped to the top of your inbox when you received a new message (or you could pin it, another feature that isn't available in gmail sigh). The bundle included a preview for all attachments in chronological order (left -> right) which made it extremely easy to find the latest attachments. In addition, Inbox provided some default bundles that worked well and were actually very useful (trips, purchases, finance), not to mention the additional info boxes that summarized the information for these basic emails like flights, receipts, and package delivery.

Really though if you've never used Inbox it's hard to explain why people loved it so much. IMO it was the email client of the future. There were just these small details that Inbox provided that made the email experience so much easier and organized. My heart is broken knowing that I won't be able to use it anymore.

[nolok]

> how were 'bundles' different from creating labels and logical filters that skip certain categories of message past the inbox?

You didn't need to have them skip the inbox, and instead had one "entry" in the inbox, that entered into the bundles rather than one specific email.

It's not functionnaly too different, but it worked very well with Inbox's permises of "your entire email workload in a single glance" and "let us sort it out for you without you needing to remember to go looking" (eg: if you have one for monster when job searching like the other comment says, you need to remember to go and check your label when job searching, but not do when not job searching, whereas the bundle is there if need be and that's it ... now multiply by 20 different bundles covering everything)

[dalore]

Bundles were easy to setup and have a special relationship with the inbox. Now on gmail you can have labels for a bundle but it will show you all the emails in that label (inbox or no).

You can then further make the search "label:foo in:inbox" to try mimic inboxes label. But that's a custom search and where do you store that? You can only save/create filters, not searches as a label.

So then you have those custom searches, you start archiving items (which is like marking as done in Inbox). But the search isn't smart enough to update. It still shows all the items, you need to refresh or navigate away for it to stop showing the items you just archived that shouldn't match your search anymore.

[lostmsu]

Never saw the feature, but from the description they simply looks like labels, but displayed inline with unlabeled email. E.g. imagine all emails from your utility company as a single long thread.

[Klathmon]

And the ability to take a one-click action on all of them in the bundle.

There were so many times that I'd snooze an entire bundle of emails about a trip until the monday before the trip, or snooze the 20 emails sent out from a work monitoring system that I need to look into later in the day, or archive an entire bundle of promo emails after glancing in them at the subject lines.

In gmail I hate the tabs because once I look at them they stop being shown as a count in that tab, and I need to select them all and archive them in multiple steps. And if you don't like the tabs, the only other way to organize is by foregoing grouping all together and throwing everything into one messy list.

[saagarjha]

Functionally that's exactly how they worked; the difference was that they were shown inline rather than off to the side.

[cherioo]

For me the main thing is bundle being automatic and the default is pretty good without needing to setup any filter.