I have 84,726 unread emails. And that’s just for one of my Gmail accounts.
[Pause for judgment.]
About 50 new emails roll in to this particular address every day, most of which will never be opened and are doomed to collect dust in my two-decade old inbox of shame.
Google announced a predicable feature this month: an AI Inbox for Gmail that scans the last seven days of your account to generate to-dos. I tested it for two weeks to figure out if it could help save me from the disaster modern email has become.
AI Inbox is still in beta and is only available if you sign up as a tester, and it might undergo changes before a public release. However, you may have noticed other ways Google is adding its Gemini AI to Gmail, including tools to help write messages and AI search overviews. (My colleague Geoffrey A. Fowler dug into the promise, perils and privacy implications of Gemini’s larger sprawl earlier this week.)
The AI Inbox tool has one job. It scans the emails in your account and creates a short to-do list for you to follow up on. The list sits in a dedicated “AI Inbox” tab, updating as new items float in. Also in the tab is a section called “Topics to catch up on.” These appear to be things that the AI wasn’t quite confident enough to mark as a “To Do” but is fairly certain you shouldn’t forget about.
AI Inbox looks at your email not as a list of individual threads, but as broader topics. Say you have a few tax forms and a request from your CPA. The AI will lump it together into a more holistic suggestion. It is also using clues like how much you contact someone to determine what’s actually important. In its current form, it’s incredibly simple. Almost too simple as there’s no way to get rid of suggestions or mark them as done, yet.
You can see how it has the potential to make email useful again — or at least less terrible. But how did we get here?
Like many (very elder) millennials, I have collected multiple Gmail accounts for different purposes. When I first signed up as a beta user, it was mostly a way to communicate with friends or family. Then I added a sacrificial account for shopping and various log-ins — the address has since been shared, sold and stolen so many times that there is no hope of making it usable manually.
The shift from personal communication tool to junk drawer happened gradually over the past three decades, fueled in part by the rise in more instant communication alternatives such as direct messages and texting.
“We’ve gotten to the point where not only is email ubiquitous in our work and private lives, it’s both become flooded with spam and less important,” says Mar Hicks, a professor and historian of technology at the University of Virginia. “It’s a perfect storm creating this giant trash can you have to go through because there are few gems you have to check for on a daily basis.”
Google tried to bring some order to the chaos before. In 2013, it added automated sorting to put emails into tabs such as Promotions and Forums. Later it added “nudges” to pull messages to the top of your inbox it detected may need a follow-up.
While email is probably here to stay, having long since become something closer to a required utility than a casual communication tool, AI’s role is less certain, Hicks says.
“On one hand, people are saying these tools are really helpful. On the other, there is an enormous amount of pushback and outright hatred for general AI,” Hicks says.
Objections to AI often include concerns about the environment, how AI is trained on content without consent from its creators, job loss and, perhaps most pertinent for Gmail, privacy.
Google says that the AI Inbox tool is not using your emails to train any AI and that it’s only actively looking back one week to generate its suggestions. There’s also no human reviewing any of the content from your emails or the AI results, it said.
I’m leaving AI Inbox turned on for now because I need all the help I can get. I will never know what all 84,726 emails are about, but maybe I can avoid forgetting to file my taxes or remember to sign up for parent teacher conferences.
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