It seems like a long time ago, but having email used to be fun back in the mid-’90s because so few people were on the Internet and it was mostly just used as a tool to communicate with your friends and family. Now, however, email has become one of the most annoying features of modern life since we have to constantly block businesses and organizations that have somehow got hold of our email address and are now spamming us with offers. When Gmail launched 10 years ago, it seemed to give us a brief reprieve from our email blues by giving us a simple way to send and receive messages through a clean user interface and with a top-notch spam filter to help keep unwanted junk from reaching our inboxes.
Just over a decade later, Gmail seems just as annoying as the old Hotmail and Yahoo accounts we abandoned for it back in the day, especially since Google seems intent on tying it to the Google+ accounts we never use. However, Geek.com has obtained some screenshots of a new leaked Gmail build that shows Google is still using its powers to come up with good ways to make email less annoying.
Among the new features that Geek.com uncovered are a new option to “pin” important emails to the top of your inbox, much as comment moderators often pin important threads at the top of message boards. Google also gives you the option of toggling through to see only emails that you’ve pinned so you can read them and respond to them all in one stroke.
Another cool feature is a “snooze” button that will let you drop an important email down in your inbox for a certain amount of time before it will pop back up again at the top as an unread message. This is particularly useful for messages that are important but that also aren’t urgent and thus are liable to get lost in your inbox if after a certain time.
Geek.com points out that none of these features may actually make it to future versions of Gmail, but they at least show us that Google isn’t sitting still in its quest to make Gmail vastly less annoying than it is today.
