Inbox For Mac

Google Inbox is a popular email web application that aims to improve your productivity by making it possible to snooze messages, bundle similar emails together and view important messages at a glance, all while providing a modern, streamlined user interface.

When accessing the service from your Mac, however, you are required to use a web browser, and you cannot receive desktop notifications. Fortunately, this native OS X app allows you to open the Google service from your desktop, and can also provide Dock and Notification Center alerts.

Inbox is a thin wrapper around the Google web app built using Electron, and provides almost the same functionality offered by the online service. The interface is more or less identical, the only difference being the dark-themed sidebar, which does look quite good.

Essentially, this application should be familiar to anyone who has used Google Inbox before, so there is no learning curve to speak of. However, it would be nice if more interface themes were included.

Many users feel that the lack of support for desktop alerts in Google Inbox is a major downside, so you should be pleased to learn that this native OS X app offers two types of notifications to ensure you never miss anything important.

First off, Inbox displays a badge on top of the Dock icon that lets you know how many unread messages need your attention. Also, the app is integrated into the Notification Center and can show desktop alerts whenever a new email has been received.

This application is a good choice for anyone who likes the look and feel of the Google Inbox service but also wants the advantages that come with using a native OS X app.

It would be great if future versions allowed you to manage multiple accounts at the same time, but users who have no need of this feature should find Inbox to be more than suitable for the task at hand.