Action required: None!
Please ignore any warning bar today about needing to upgrade. You can just close it and ActiveInbox will work fine.
What happened?
Gmail has recently done a flurry of updates of its own, which occasionally knocks ActiveInbox off balance. (AIB has done surprisingly well over the years at clinging on, the little Gmail urchin that it is, but this was a fairly tectonic shift inside Gmail).
In this case, it led to the Upgrade bar being erroneously exposed.
I promise it’s not just a cynical cash grab 😀
When will it be fixed?
You can just close the bar and everything will work fine. (We intentionally keep the nag bar and actual working features of ActiveInbox separate, just in case of days like this!)
I’ve sent a fixed version of ActiveInbox to Google to be published, so I hope it’ll be automatically with you in 24 hours and we can forget this money-grubbing incident.
Anything else you want to share?
Well, why thank you for asking!
Anyone who has been kind enough (or gung-ho enough) to join me on a call in the last few years knows there’s been a lot of trying to figure out what else I can improve in email, and an arid, tumble-weed-blowing dearth of actual public releases. (Mainly because I was log-jammed with possibilities, but nothing was deafeningly obvious as the best idea to get behind.)
Then AI happened.
For the last few months, a few corporate customers have asked me to help automate/scale their processes with AI, and while I’m about the least corporately-employable person around, I took the jobs as a chance to brainstorm what the possibilities are. And they’re pretty fantastic. (If you ignore the whole Skynet/capitalism-collapsing possibilities… *whistles*).
So now it’s clear… there’s a ton of fascinating ways to make email management, and even better, customer experiences, easy and fast using little AI software assistants.
Ok, enough waffle – you probably want an example… Well, in one little prototype, AI proved fantastic at automatically extracting and drafting Sub Tasks for a long email. Imagine that going further, and it presents you with a morning view of “Here’s your inbox, we’ve grouped it by project and put a summary of the top task in each email – let’s go!”.
Keep your eyes peeled as I’ll be sending email invites for things like this!
This was written by Andy Mitchell