Nudge an E-Mail to Come Back Later
Do you ever feel as if there are e-mails in your inbox that are just staring at you? Taunting you as you click on newer messages? If they could speak, they would probably rudely say, “Hey buddy, look at me, you haven't responded to me yet!
Context & Ripple Effects
Email overload has been building as a story for years in this coverage — from warnings about being digitally bombarded back in 2008 to GigaOM's 2009 argument that email clients need to change. Google has been answering that critique incrementally from inside Gmail: first Undo Send in Labs in 2009, then Priority Inbox in August 2010.
"Come Back Later" extends that same playbook at the level of the individual message — instead of ranking what matters, it lets a user push a specific nagging e-mail out of view and have it resurface later. The alternative, until now, lived in workflow advice like Kevin Rose's time-saving tips: manual triage, folders, and discipline.
First-order effects
- Gmail Labs users gain a per-message deferral control — a specific unanswered e-mail can be scheduled to reappear, replacing the leave-it-in-the-inbox-and-feel-guilty default.
- Google deepens its position that inbox management is a product feature to ship, not behavior to teach, directly answering the client-redesign case GigaOM made in 2009.
Second-order effects
- Other webmail providers face pressure to match message-level controls like snoozing and prioritization, since Gmail is bundling them natively while rivals still rely on folders and filters.
- Third-party inbox-workflow advice and utilities lose some of their audience as the behaviors they coached — defer, deprioritize, batch — get absorbed into the client itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the e-mail client evolves from passive message storage into an active triage assistant, with vendors competing on attention management rather than storage limits or spam filtering.
- Feature-by-feature absorption of productivity tools into free webmail narrows the space where standalone inbox-add-on developers can survive — the same consolidation dynamic that hit browser extensions before them.
The trend: E-mail providers are absorbing overload management into the client itself — Undo Send, Priority Inbox, and now Come Back Later are one arc of Google turning inbox discipline from user habit into shipped software.