Inbox is Google's attempt to organize email in a more intuitive, useful way than the standard that was pretty much set by Outlook in the 90s. It presents a re-thought email system for the modern age, where storage is not a problem, but sorting through reams of digital information and communication has become one.

Reimagining something as established and ingrained into our daily habits as email is a tough proposition. But it's not impossible, and Google's Inbox app for Gmail -- for iOS, Android and the web (but only through an invite, at the moment) -- may have the potential to set a new standard in how we use email for the first time since ... well, Gmail.

Uncluttering Inundated Inboxes

Inbox's primary purpose is to dispense with the old "organizational" method of a long, unfiltered list of emails and replace it with something that's tidier -- and it's especially designed for those who receive huge numbers of daily emails and need better ways to identify and organize what's important, what's not, which emails can wait, and which ones can wait but still need to be addressed soon.

To accomplish this, Inbox uses sorting algorithms to identify the likely category of most of your emails -- especially the automatic kind that can clutter up a busy professional's inbox seconds after they've just gone through it.

Much of the torrent of daily emails is grouped into "bundles" like promotional, purchases, finance and social by default -- so what might otherwise be a dozen non-priority emails taking up a whole screen's worth of your inbox, instead gets compressed into a single email slot.

Like any automatic email sorting, bundles can be tricky. If you can't find an email you were expecting, you'll have to check your bundles -- much like how even the best spam filters sometimes necessitate the occasional search when you subscribe to a new service that your email provider doesn't recognize.

Luckily, these bundles -- though collapsed into one email slot -- still appear towards the top of your inbox in accordance to when the most recent message in the bundle was received. So it's easy to identify recent bundled messages and check inside if you're waiting on a particular email in that category.

It's also easy to completely disable any bundle, so if you really want to pay attention to every social media robo-email, for example, you can disable "Social" and set loose Twitter and Facebook on your inbox.

You can also remove specific email from bundles, and Inbox will remember not to sort it next time. If Google's presets aren't sufficient, you can create custom bundles as well.

Finally! "Read It Later" for Email

With a split second's-worth of input, Inbox can also keep you on top of important emails -- especially when you don't have the time to address them on-the-go.

There are two different options in Inbox to mark emails to read later: "Pin" an email and it'll stay in your inbox. The next time you have a moment to address that email, the "pinned" toggle up top provides a quick filter that only shows your pinned messages.

You can also snooze messages to automatically reappear at a later time. They can also reappear based on location, so for example, you can set personal emails to wait until 7 p.m., or to reappear based on when you get home. You won't forget to address them, but you won't have to do it in the middle of your workday, either.

(Photo : Google Play: Inbox)

Designed for (Big) Smartphones

Inbox takes advantage of Google's new "Material Design" philosophy, making it faster and more intuitive to navigate -- especially using one hand with swiping gestures.

For example, (like the new Gmail 5.0 app) the floating "Compose" button is always accessible. When you press it, recent contacts automatically fan out so you won't have to search before sending your most frequent messages. Also in the Compose mini-menu are reminders, integrated with Google Now. But more on that in a bit.

Also like the Gmail app, you can swipe emails to archive them. (Another modern aspect of Inbox in age of boundless cloud storage: It ditches the delete option altogether in favor of archiving.) But you can also swipe in the other direction to set a snooze timer, making that already great feature even more convenient, on-the-go.

Integrating Reminders into the Inbox

The old days of sending yourself an email reminder are over -- but soon, so too will the (more recent) days of using a standalone reminder app that you hope integrates across all of your devices.

By incorporating Google Now reminders into Inbox, complete with pinning and snoozing options, Google is one step closer to having a single reminder system that's accessible through all of the important everyday channels: calendar, notifications and especially your inbox.

(Photo : Google Play: Inbox)

It sounds silly, but you're infinitely more likely to use reminders when you can set them from within the biggest wellspring of things to remember -- which for most people is email. No more searching for your reminder app after reading an email or even switching back to the home screen to use Google Now. It's all right there, intuitively placed under the "compose" mini-menu.

Still Room For Expansion, Refinement

Inbox works for iOS, Android and the web, but it's still invite-only. I didn't experience any performance issues, bugs or crashes during my week of use, but Inbox is still hampered by limitations that will hopefully disappear with the public release of the app.

First, Inbox needs to handle multiple accounts better. Right now, like with the regular Gmail app, users have to manually switch between their various Gmail accounts to access email. For an app designed to revolutionize email for the ultra-connected (who probably have at least two gmail accounts), this seems like a strange, "retro" oversight. Inbox at least needs some sort of "overview" mode for users to get a quick sense of what's going on in all of their Gmail accounts, and the clever designers at Google can probably figure out an even more intuitive approach than that.

Along the same lines, the biggest limitation is that Inbox only works for Gmail right now. Any email app seeking a broad user base needs to be a generalist and work with most major third-party email providers -- a feature the Gmail app version 5.0 just got. But Inbox needs cross-compatibility even more, because it's meant for professionals and power users who probably have several email accounts across various services.

However, whether Inbox's creepy, magic bundling feature will work without Gmail's particular content-scanning ad platform is unknown and could be a major stumbling block for that feature working with third-party enterprise email services like Outlook.

But beyond that, Inbox would really make everyone's lives easier if desktop versions -- not just the web app -- arrived for Windows, OS X and Chrome OS.

The web app version of Inbox is similar to the mobile app, meaning it has great features and an intuitive UI. But needing to log into your browser to check email is a pain -- and it's especially unattractive to the power users Inbox is designed for. Unless I'm using a computer I don't own, I never go to the web for Gmail, and I won't for Inbox, feature-packed though it may be.

Similarly -- and this is an easy one -- a full release of Inbox should offer at least one Android widget for the homescreen, which is completely lacking from the current version.

Tap That App

That said, if you get the chance (i.e., via an invitation), check out Inbox on your smartphone. (Follow us on Twitter, tweet this story out, and/or send a nice message, and I might extend an invite!)

Whether or not Inbox eventually replaces Gmail is up to Google. According to an "inside the lab" report from TechCrunch on this weekend, Inbox has been a contentious issue within Google between its "power user" proponents and members of the Gmail team that want to stay the course and provide a simpler email app for the general consumer. One could argue that, as technology has advanced, today's power user is tomorrow's general consumer, as the number of daily emails and separate accounts has

It explains why Inbox (still in its early, invite-only stage) and Gmail apps currently exist side-by-side and portends an uncertain future for the app that rethinks how we deal with email.

Perhaps Inbox will only be released as a niche email product, or maybe as part of a "Google for Businesses" professional subscription package.

But at the very least, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of Inbox's most useful, intuitive features making their way to Google's flagship mail app -- and, without doubt, mimicked by competitors -- in the near future.