The ability to mark emails as done or to pin them were hallmark features of the Inbox interface and they both take significantly more work in Gmail. I'm severely disappointed that they've decided to axe Inbox without at least pretending to care - by eg. providing a user survey.

Marking emails as done is just as easy in gmail as it was in inbox (I switched back a while ago). In inbox, swiping to "done" is equivalent to applying the archived label, which you can (in android and web, though apparently not ios), have swiping/closing the email do.

How do you mark a large list of emails as archived/deleted in Android?

Do you mean like selecting multiple (which I believe is possible, but I don't have the gmail app handy to check) and then labelling them all together, or like swiping a bundle away (which there is nothing analogous to I don't believe)

Oh no, pinning! I've so thoroughly integrated that into my expectations and behavior that I didn't even think about it.

I don't use Inbox -- what does pinning accomplish?

Inbox builds on a set of useful primitive ideas, but understanding them is necessary to understand pinning's value.

The central idea of Inbox is that your goal is INBOX ZERO, and that after dealing with any email, you swipe it to the side (or mark it as Done with the checkmark in the web UI) and _do not see it again_. (Like 'Archive' in Gmail.)

The second idea is that your emails are Bundled by category. This is similar to a tag or a filter, but you can choose to have them still show (as a bundle) in the inbox, rather than being filtered to not-seen oblivion. For example, I had one bundle for Pull Requests, another for Jira notifications. The app auto-categorizers things for Finances, Promos, etc, so many of the spam-like newsletters you get will end up bundled together. (Bundles default to only showing things that are not Done, unless you click a bundle's category on the left navigation bar.)

That doesn't sound very useful. What makes it useful is that you can archive/Done an entire category. All of those emails from TeeFury, Newegg, Amazon, Steam, Github, etc that you would normally consider usually-clutter suddenly are SUPER easy to deal with. It basically makes archiving those no longer annoying, as you can do it all at once. Best of all, you see them first, so it's harder to have something get filtered without being noticed.

Pinning prevents you from archiving an item (unless you explicitly click it). This means that you can ping something in a bundle, archive the bundle, and it will archive all the other things, and leave the bundle with that one item visible.

I am profoundly saddened that Inbox is going away. As others have said, it _changed my life_ in terms of how I dealt with overwhelming email volumes at work.

Ack, that just hit me now, too.

This is what I'm going to miss most. Heard the news and went to check the Gmail app only to realize I was going to have to spend much more time in my inbox.

I was bothered about the same thing but it looks like in the Gmail app you can configure the left/right swipes separately to "Archive", "Delete", "Mark as read/unread", "Move to", "Snooze" and "None". The default seems to be both set to "Archive".