Look, I know there are solid third-party email apps out there like Spark, Thunderbird, and Proton Mail — believe me, I've tried them all over the years. I always come back to Google's Gmail because it's the platform I'm most comfortable with and that I've used for the longest. Still, I've never found a way to manage my very busy inbox efficiently, especially as I pipe more email addresses through it. At various points, I've tried an urgency-related triage system, and sorting email into specific folders, but nothing has really stuck.

That's why the idea of Google's Gemini managing the flow of my Gmail inbox with AI Inbox and Smart Overviews appeals to me. In a recent blog post, Blake Barnes,Google's Vice President of Product for Gmail, outlined how the tech giant plans to integrate AI into its popular email app.

“With email volume at an all-time high, managing your inbox and the flow of information has become as important as the emails themselves. To help, we’re bringing Gmail into the Gemini era and making it your personal, proactive inbox assistant,” writesBarnes in the post.

So what does this mean? A lot of the expected AI slop features are here, like Help Me Write, which as you likely already guessed, allows AI to generate emails from scratch, and Smart Replies, which has evolved into Suggested Replies that better match a user's tone.

These features don't appeal to me and are excellent examples of questionably useful AI being shoved into a popular app. If you're a Google AI Pro ($20 per month) or Ultra subscriber ($249 per month), you can also get access to Proofreading, which, if you don't subscribe to a platform like Grammarly and already have a pricey Google AI premium subscription, could be useful.

AI Inbox and Smart Overviews some of the first in-app AI features that seem great

It's unclear when AI Inbox will get a wider release

Where things get interesting is when it comes to the AI Inbox and Smart Overviews. Instead of a top-down list of emails like you're used to, AI Inbox creates a personalized briefing with a list of to-dos, short briefings that summarize emails, and shifts emails you need to pay attention to the most to the top of your inbox. The feature is rolling out first to "trusted testers" in the US that are using consumer Gmail accounts (workspace accounts can't access AI Inbox yet).

On the other hand, with Smart Overviews you're able to get a straightforward AI answer to any question you've typed into your Gmail inbox search bar. For example, if you're trying to hunt down that specific email from 2014 that you know is buried deep in a sprwaling thread, in theory, AI Overview should be able to find the nugget of information you're hunting for quickly, as long as you offer up enough context. Google says that, like its Search AI Overview feature, the Gmail version is designed to work with natural language. Given I have 400GB of saved emails spanning roughly 20 years, I can really see myself taking advantage of this feature.

AI inbox will be "more broadly available in the coming months" and isn't tied to a subscription, while Smart Overviews is exclusive to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

From a privacy perspective, Google says that its new AI Gmail features offer the "privacy protections you expect from Google," but it doesn't elaborate further. In the past, Google has stated that it doesn't use Gmail content to train its Gemini AI models. If you don't want Gemini scanning through your inbox, you can turn these new AI features off.