Well, it’s been a week – and I mean that both literally and emotionally. The Gmail change caused the longest period of instability we’ve had in nearly 8 years (thankfully those kinds of changes are still rare – normally when it happens we rush to have a fix out before most people notice the change, but because this stopped ActiveInbox accessing email IDs it broke a lot more things).
Last week we had a slightly crazed, manic energy trying to fix the biggest issues, and those were all wrapped up in 7.10.4 (see last post). Then over the weekend, I had some breathing room to more methodically clear up the rest. Those fixes have finally been published in 7.10.20.
Action: Please make sure you’re on 7.10.20
(Did I tell you to do a manual install by email? Skip this for the next section)
First, go to your extensions list:
- Open a new tab in Chrome
- Paste this text into the address bar and press enter: chrome://extensions
(Or manually use Chrome’s menu to go to your Extensions list)
It should look like this:
Finally:
- Temporarily enable ‘Developer Mode’ using the toggle button in the top right
- Click the ‘Update’ button in the top left
- Check ActiveInbox is showing as 7.10.20.
- The refresh Gmail
Action: If I told you to manually install 7.10.20, get back on the official channel
As Google can sometimes be painfully slow releasing our updates, I was advising some of you to fast-track it by manually installing the fixed version. That’s not designed to be a long-term solution, and we need to get you back on the official channel (so it will resume auto-updating in the future).
First, go to your extensions list:
- Open a new tab in Chrome
- Paste this text into the address bar and press enter: chrome://extensions
(Or manually use Chrome’s menu to go to your Extensions list)
It should look like this:
- Then click to Remove on the ActiveInbox card
- Go to https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/activeinbox-organize-gmai/oeehiifcaeengdofhogmkblhkmpephcj
- Click Install
- Reload Gmail, and sign into ActiveInbox again
You can re-enable the Summarise AI button in Gmail
A temporary workaround last week was to disable the ‘Summarise this Email’ button. If you did that, you can now re-activate it.
- Open Gmail’s Settings
- Go to the General Tab
- Scroll down to “Google Workspace smart features“
- Click Manage Workspace smart feature settings
- Check the option that includes ‘Ask Gemini to summarise content’
What we’re doing about this for the future
I can’t stress enough how acutely I understand the impact downtime has on your work, and we work every possible hour during Gmail changes to get things working again.
But I also feel that ‘working hard’ is not good enough: we simply need less downtime.
To an extent, with a Gmail change of this severity there was nothing we could have done to avoid some downtime. We depended on those Gmail IDs and it hit ActiveInbox’s internals hard.
But ActiveInbox has evolved organically over nearly 20 years, responding to many dramatic Gmail changes in that time, and as such, the code has become somewhat complex.
In the last post, I mentioned we’ve spent the last two years working on a new ‘engine’ for ActiveInbox.
Well, a major goal is increased robustness: simply by being more modern. It’s the difference between retrofitting a 200 year old house vs. building a new one with all expected facilities: it was specifically designed from the start to work with the Gmail of 2025, including everything I’ve learnt about the ways Gmail will likely change in the future, so it’s faster at healing from it.
We’re working as fast as we can to get it in your hands!
One more reminder: please talk to us!
I’m just going to put our support email here: support@activeinboxhq.com
If you write in, you’ll be reaching either Lisa (who has worked with us for 14 years) or me (Andy). We’re here when things go wrong, are delighted by feature requests or problems to solve, and even occasionally just have a natter (Lisa, for example, has some strong opinions on Chrome and will no doubt wax lyrical about the virtues of Opera. No she’s not affiliated… are you Lisa?! For the record, I still recommend Chrome!)
This was written by Andy Mitchell