Update: Inbox Pause has graduated, and is now a feature within Boomerang for Gmail and Boomerang for Outlook. Learn more here!
As the holiday season approached, the Boomerang (Inbox Pause) team worked secretly on a gift for all of our Inbox Pause users. Today, we’re proud to unveil it. A substantial update to Inbox Pause is immediately available that makes the plugin faster, more reliable, and easier than ever to use.
Inbox Pause started in 2012 as a hackathon project, when one of our engineers figured out that it was possible for an extension to “pretend” to be a user creating a filter in Gmail. We were delighted by the workaround that allowed us to pause your incoming mail, helping tens of thousands of users stem the tide of perpetual email interruption. Our trick worked magically, most of the time. But sometimes it didn’t. And since the workaround was completely unsupported, for a long time, we couldn’t do much to improve Inbox Pause. There weren’t any official ways or best practices to pause a user’s Inbox; our hacked-together approach was the only way.
But things changed when Google announced the creation of the Gmail Settings API: an official, supported way to manage users’ filters, Out of Office responders, and labels. Suddenly, a more robust Inbox Pause was possible. And so the team got to work. We completely rewrote the plugin to use this new, officially-Google-supported way to perform the magic needed to pause your inbox. The result: a better, faster, much more reliable Inbox Pause plugin that you can count on, every day, to just work.
Thanks to the new API, the now robust Inbox Pause still manages to support all the same powerful features. You can manually pause your Inbox and unpause when you’re ready, or you can set messages to only arrive in your Inbox at prescheduled times throughout the day. A recent study from the University of British Columbia found that users who checked email only three times a day were much less stressed, without a negative impact on their responsiveness. Either way you use it, Inbox Pause can help you work less distractedly and more effectively.
So we hope you’ll give the new Inbox Pause a try, as we can’t think of a more appropriate time to pause your inbox than this holiday season. Whether you’re getting together with family or friends, shopping under the holiday lights, watching your favorite movie marathon on TV, or simply reflecting back on the crazy year that was 2016, we hope you can find the time to take a break from your email. Even if it’s only for a few hours, we hope Inbox Pause will let you focus on the things that matter this holiday season.
P.S. Inbox Pause isn’t our only plugin that benefited from Gmail’s new APIs: Boomerang for Gmail (our most popular plugin) also has gotten a number of updates this past year. Boomerang now has a new feature called Respondable that uses artificial intelligence to tell you how likely your email is to get a response and provide actionable advice on how to make it better before you even send it!
