Google released their new App Inbox. It’s meant to be the future of Email with a different approach to organise and handle incoming mails. The future currently is invite only. Obviously it works on top of Gmail, so no native support for other protocols. Apps are available for Android, iOS and Chrome. Yes, not even all browsers are supported. Google is in a position to form the future of the medium and bring it forward, but this is not in Google’s interest. They want to lock down their users, that’s how they make money.

Over the course of the last two years I started to use Google for less and less and I have no plans in changing this.

Mailbox is also doing interesting work with their approach. They offer native applications for Android, iOS and the Mac. A web client is missing. They also don’t support plain IMAP, just iCloud and Gmail, but I have high hopes that this will change in the future. It’s not clear to me what Mailbox, owned by Dropbox, want’s to achieve in the long run but I have more trust in Dropbox than in Google.

I see those two companies as the only real innovators at the moment when it comes to Email. No one supports open standards. So for now, I’m continuing to use Mail.app.