As he is wont to do, Artem likes to grumble on Google+ about various apps, services, devices, and things that don't work as perfectly as he expects them to. His latest bout of complaints hit Inbox, Google's recent effort to modernize and simplify email management, and addressed the lack of Mark as unread, labels, signatures, and an easy way to trash items. If you've ever received an email from the man, you'd know he loves his "Sincerely, Artem" signature, which might come after a friendly request, a question, a thanks, or a command to fix something in an article as fast as (and preferably faster than) your fingers can type and click.

But I digress. Artem's post garnered a few comments from other disappointed users and eventually the +Inbox by Gmail team chimed in with this reply:

Appreciate the feedback everyone.

We're working on both Signatures and Delete. Pin and Snooze are both designed to replace mark as unread.

We already knew that signatures were coming after Cody looked through the crystal ball of v1.7's code and tore it down. Labels are a new addition, but an expected one indeed. Inbox' focus on bundles clears out a good portion of the usual email clutter, but it doesn't address specific situations where labels could better help organize and classify communications. Delete already exists, but it's tucked away in the overflow menu, requiring more steps than necessary to declutter your inbox. As someone who deletes email more often than archive them, I couldn't ever get along with Inbox, but an improvement to the feature with a faster way to access it would make me reconsider.

It seems though that marking emails as unread, a method we all inefficiently use to keep emails visible if we want to tend to them later, is on its way out. You've opened an email? If the answer is yes, then it's read by mere logic. If you need to act on this email later, then you can pin it or snooze it. It has the same effect, without giving the illusion that there are new emails in your inbox.

Source: +Artem Russakovskii