Just want the fix? Scroll down to the section on switching to the Beta channel.

The task bar is greyed out

You’ll have spotted that ActiveInbox’s task bar is now greyed out while viewing an email.

If I may take a moment, it’s oddly a good thing that it’s greyed out.

If you read the earlier blog post, you’ll know that two weeks Gmail changed something that prevented ActiveInbox from getting accurate email IDs. One of the side effects of that was that notes could not be saved, but gave the appearance of being saved because the task bar looked normal.

So one of the improvements we rolled out was to make it unambiguous: if ActiveInbox isn’t 100% certain it had the correct ID for your email, it now disables that bar to prevent unexpected behaviour.

Which is one silver lining on an otherwise very dark cloud of not finding the ID again…

What caused it?

It’s kind of an “aftershock” of the issue from two weeks ago. As a reminder, that was due to ActiveInbox being unable to get the email’s ID after a Gmail change… well, they’ve changed again with a slight twist, bringing the issue back.

The great news is, all the work of the last two weeks meant it was very easy to handle: I got it fixed within an hour of the first support email coming in.

The frustrating news is, we still have to wait for Google to roll it out to you. 7.10.24 is currently on its way through their publication process.

How can I get the fixed version?

The amazing news is they’ve fast-tracked the Beta channel, so you can actually get 7.10.24 right this second by switching to it.

But don’t worry if that’s too much hassle, we can also give you a temporary workaround to keep you going until the regular version updates.

Option 1: Switch to the Beta to get 7.10.24 now

All you have to do is temporarily uninstall the regular version and reinstall the Beta version:

• Open your Extensions list in Chrome (follow the menu, or paste chrome://extensions into your address bar)
• Remove ActiveInbox
• Go to our Beta channel and click Add to Chrome
• Refresh Gmail

Note: You’ll need to switch back to the official channel in a few days! You can do this by reversing the process: in your Extensions list, uninstall ActiveInbox Beta and reinstall it from the regular channel.

Option 2: use the workarounds of Gmail labels until Thursday

I’m reasonably confident that Google will deploy 7.10.24 to everyone within the next 24 hours – so by early Thursday.

While that’s happening, parts of ActiveInbox will still work:

• You can view your task lists and click into emails from there
• The hover menu still works in the email lists (e.g. your inbox, search results, the task lists), to add due dates, projects, etc.

To add a due date or project in an email view there is a helpful workaround: you can add them by adding Gmail labels.

E.g. to add a due date for today, you can add the label ZD/20251126 for the 26th November 2025 (that’s because date labels work in the format ZD/yyyymmdd). Or to add an email to the Acme project, add the label P/Acme (all projects are a label that is prefixed with P/).

The only thing you cannot do with this workaround is to add sub tasks / notes to an email.

One more reminder! You can always talk to us

I’m just going to put our support email here: support@activeinboxhq.com

If you write in, you’ll be reaching either Lisa (who has worked with us for 14 years) or me (Andy). We’re here when things go wrong, are delighted by feature requests or problems to solve, and even just have a chat (Lisa has knowledge – or failing that, at least strong opinions! – on a genuinely astonishing range of topics).

Last week we had a slightly crazed, manic energy trying to fix the biggest issues, and those were all wrapped up in 7.10.4 (see last post). Then over the weekend, I had some breathing room to more methodically clear up the rest. Those fixes have finally been published in 7.10.20.

Action: Please make sure you’re on 7.10.20

(Did I tell you to do a manual install by email? Skip this for the next section)

First, go to your extensions list:

• Open a new tab in Chrome
• Paste this text into the address bar and press enter: chrome://extensions
  (Or manually use Chrome’s menu to go to your Extensions list)

It should look like this:

Finally:

• Temporarily enable ‘Developer Mode’ using the toggle button in the top right
• Click the ‘Update’ button in the top left
• Check ActiveInbox is showing as 7.10.20.
• The refresh Gmail

Action: If I told you to manually install 7.10.20, get back on the official channel

As Google can sometimes be painfully slow releasing our updates, I was advising some of you to fast-track it by manually installing the fixed version. That’s not designed to be a long-term solution, and we need to get you back on the official channel (so it will resume auto-updating in the future).

First, go to your extensions list:

• Open a new tab in Chrome
• Paste this text into the address bar and press enter: chrome://extensions
  (Or manually use Chrome’s menu to go to your Extensions list)

It should look like this:

• Then click to Remove on the ActiveInbox card
• Go to https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/activeinbox-organize-gmai/oeehiifcaeengdofhogmkblhkmpephcj
• Click Install
• Reload Gmail, and sign into ActiveInbox again

You can re-enable the Summarise AI button in Gmail

A temporary workaround last week was to disable the ‘Summarise this Email’ button. If you did that, you can now re-activate it.

• Open Gmail’s Settings
• Go to the General Tab
• Scroll down to “Google Workspace smart features“
• Click Manage Workspace smart feature settings
• Check the option that includes ‘Ask Gemini to summarise content’

What we’re doing about this for the future

I can’t stress enough how acutely I understand the impact downtime has on your work, and we work every possible hour during Gmail changes to get things working again.

But I also feel that ‘working hard’ is not good enough: we simply need less downtime.

To an extent, with a Gmail change of this severity there was nothing we could have done to avoid some downtime. We depended on those Gmail IDs and it hit ActiveInbox’s internals hard.

But ActiveInbox has evolved organically over nearly 20 years, responding to many dramatic Gmail changes in that time, and as such, the code has become somewhat complex.

In the last post, I mentioned we’ve spent the last two years working on a new ‘engine’ for ActiveInbox.

Well, a major goal is increased robustness: simply by being more modern. It’s the difference between retrofitting a 200 year old house vs. building a new one with all expected facilities: it was specifically designed from the start to work with the Gmail of 2025, including everything I’ve learnt about the ways Gmail will likely change in the future, so it’s faster at healing from it.

We’re working as fast as we can to get it in your hands!

One more reminder: please talk to us!

I’m just going to put our support email here: support@activeinboxhq.com

If you write in, you’ll be reaching either Lisa (who has worked with us for 14 years) or me (Andy). We’re here when things go wrong, are delighted by feature requests or problems to solve, and even occasionally just have a natter (Lisa, for example, has some strong opinions on Chrome and will no doubt wax lyrical about the virtues of Opera. No she’s not affiliated… are you Lisa?! For the record, I still recommend Chrome!)

• The fix for the original problem has rolled out. You need to make sure you’re on 7.10.2 – just follow the instructions below. [13th November 2025]
• Some people are still affected, even on 7.10.2. For this, you have to temporarily turn off Gmail’s “Summarise this email” button – instructions below [13th November 2025]
• I’ve sent a new fix for distribution, which will be version 7.10.4. After you’ve got that, you can re-enable the Summarise button [13th November 2025]

Ok, back to the post…

We’ve just had a whopping Gmail change that broke ActiveInbox, so I want to share a quick post-mortem and give you instructions for the fix.

But it’s also been ages since I checked in as I’ve had my head deep in code (this is Andy, ActiveInbox’s founder), so I wanted to say hello and share what I’m working on.

The ‘clicks not working’ bug

You’ve probably already spotted something is wrong, but broadly these things have been a problem for the last few days:

• You’ve tried clicking a task – e.g. in your Today list – and nothing happened
• In some emails, you can’t set a new task (e.g. you can’t pick a due date)
• Most weirdly of all, you might find your due dates or notes ‘slipping’ and appearing on the wrong email (don’t worry, they’re not really on the wrong email… I’ll explain in a moment).

Basically, there’s been a Gmail change. In fact it looks like a temporary bug on their part.

Essentially, they’ve stopped sharing the ID of the emails with Gmail addons. (The reason I think it’s a bug is they still think they’re sharing the ID: it exists in the usual place, but it’s just a bit of garbled nonsense instead.)

Not having an accurate ID creates these issues:

• When you click a task in the task list, it doesn’t know which email to load
• When viewing an email, it can’t find the matching due date and notes
• When viewing an email, it can’t assign a due date / notes

I am sorry that it took us a few days to fix: it was a deep bug (as you can imagine, not having email IDs affects a LOT of things). In the end, we managed to find some solid workarounds – but I’m still hoping Google realises it’s a bug in Gmail and reverts it.

(I did some digging while trying to find a fix and discovered that other Gmail addons are affected too and haven’t found a ‘proper’ solution either… which is what makes me hopeful Google will respond).

Fix: make sure you’ve upgraded to 7.10.2

First, go to your extensions list:

• Open a new tab in Chrome
• Paste this text into the address bar and press enter: chrome://extensions
  (Or manually use Chrome’s menu to go to your Extensions list)

It should look like this:

Finally:

• Temporarily enable ‘Developer Mode’ using the toggle button in the top right
• Click the ‘Update’ button in the top left
• Check ActiveInbox is showing as 7.10.2
• The refresh Gmail

Still affected, even on 7.10.2?

Some of you are still finding that you can’t add a due date while in an email. Or that the task bar in an email has the incorrect information.

The problem – utterly bizarrely – is Gmail’s own “Summarize this email” button. For the life of me I don’t know why they did this, but under the hood they’ve made that button look technically identical to any other email. So ActiveInbox is trying to read it like an email, and crashing.

This isn’t affecting everyone – and sadly it isn’t affecting any of my test accounts so I didn’t spot it. But I spoke to Greg in France this afternoon and we figured it out (merci Greg!).

I’ve got this fixed too, and I’m sending the next update out (7.10.4), but while you wait there’s actually a really quick workaround…

Fix for 7.10.2: temporarily disable the Summarise button

Yes, I’m aware I sound crazy for saying this – it’s crazy to me too! – but it will get you working.

• Open Gmail’s Settings
• Go to the General Tab
• Scroll down to “Google Workspace smart features“
• Click Manage Workspace smart feature settings
• Uncheck the option that includes ‘Ask Gemini to summarise content’

When you refresh Gmail, ActiveInbox should be working again.

And when 7.10.4 is available, you can re-enable the Summarise this Email button.

What’s the key thing if it happens again in the future?

Gmail does change from time to time, and we’re forced to react as fast as we can – but it can still lead to spell of downtime.

If it happens, the most important thing to remember is that ActiveInbox just uses Gmail’s own labels for data storage. Every due date and project in AIB is just a Gmail label.

The format for a date label is ZD/YYYYMMDD, so today (12th November) would be ZD/20251112.

That means you can always find emails you’ve given a due date.

And for any period that AIB isn’t working after a Gmail change, you can still add Gmail labels manually – and when it starts working again those emails will be tracked in ActiveInbox.

Roadmap (aka what I’ve been working on)

I’m working on a huge new power for ActiveInbox: the ability to collaborate more effectively with others (even if they don’t have ActiveInbox installed).

The original motivation was when I did a lot of research with you a few years ago, so many of you said the biggest pain was that other people don’t respond promptly (or sometimes at all).

The idea is that when you send an email, it’ll carry interactive widgets that help the recipient feel more in control with you (and be able to answer you more quickly).

The wonderful part is that if you feel like you’re the only organised person in a chaotic group, then you become the light bringer who increases the organisation of everyone around you – each interaction is tracked and controlled for both of you.

In addition to the new abilities, I’ve also developed an entirely new data system for ActiveInbox which will let it handle a lot more emails without slowing down (this is the main reason the new functionality has taken me a long time… it’s replacing code that originally took us over a decade to write. I’ve speed-run writing it in under a year, but I do wish I could have done it even faster!).

You can always talk to us!

Many kind customers have emailed in to find out what’s happening, but in truth it’s a lot of names that I recognise from previous conversations… i.e. people who already know us.

That makes me think there’s a lot more people out there who needed help but didn’t think to email in.

We’re a small company, with no AI or remote service people – when you email in, you reach Lisa or me. So please don’t hesitate to get in touch to support@activeinboxhq.com .

We got to the office this morning to find a flurry of emails that hit us more effectively than 6 shots of espresso… “ActiveInbox has been down” “Did you have an outage?” “I can’t log in”.

We’ve been doing this a long time, and I immediately had some theories… The number 1 suspect was that we’re close to our annual security audit with Google, and I thought that might have triggered a permissions problem. The 2nd thought was that Chrome might have updated and changed some operational detail that created waves for us. Only in a distant 3rd – almost as an afterthought – did I consider it might be at our end. (This isn’t arrogance. It’s just we’ve made no server updates in the last few weeks so it would be very unexpected.)

So it was something of a shock when I logged into our hosting metrics and found this:

I’m sure you’ll spot, with the bare minimum of sleuthing, that “big red blotches” aren’t what we like to see.

It transpires that our provider (Heroku) had a global outage about an hour after we went home last night. They’re status page indicates it took them most of the night to fully resolve it, but the good news is we’re back now.

If you’ve followed our handful of outages over the last decade, you might wonder why we’ve stuck with Heroku. I’ll be honest, it’s not a comfortable decision: we’d love to find someone to be our forever home. The problem is no one else has the same combination of “we take care of most of it for you” and serious credentials (they’re owned by Salesforce and powered by Amazon).

We’re sticking with them a while longer, but I’ll be seeking answers on why they were so slow to notify our alerting systems.

We’re going as fast as we can – and my extra apologies for those who emailed in, as Lisa has an appointment this morning that means she’s late in and won’t have replied yet – the timing is truly unbelievable as she is famous for never taking time off! But please know that we’re 100% focused on the engineering side.

What’s causing it?

I believe it’s now fixed (see our latest update) – I’m just working to make sure the systems auto-recover from this in the future, after which I’ll declare it 100% resolved.

Original 10am GMT

It looks like a continuation/echo of the problem we had a month ago (where our server hosts changed something without notifying us first). But I’ll report back any findings as they happen.

Update 11:53am GMT

It was a continuation of the last problem (I was immediately suspicious, as it’s exactly 1 month since the previous one). Our server host changed the authorisation process to an underlying service last night, and this time it affected one of our support servers.

The good news is that the work we did last month, to the main server, has been 100% rock solid. And I’ve manually got the support server working to make sure ActiveInbox will load.

We have a long-term plan to move to a new server host, as their behaviour has been untenable (they’re the formerly rock solid company called Heroku, now owned by Salesforce no less – but the acquisition seems to have become a low priority for them, and lots of their other customers are vocally moving away, as will we).

But to make that process smooth, it’s going to take some time.

So until then, if this issue occurs again I want ActiveInbox to auto-fix itself. I’m working on that now.

Update at 12:20pm GMT

I spoke too soon – the major problem is solved, but there’s something else that’s still affecting people. I’m digging in again.

Update at 12:33pm GMT

It appears part of our server host has become inaccessible (starting suspiciously at 11:50 when I think we solved the initial problem – and its the same underlying service that’s affected). I believe this to be a problem at their end, but rather than understand it I’m just going to see if I can replace that component to get you back up ASAP.

Update at 12:41pm GMT

All is OK again! Judging from our metrics, errors have fallen to 0… so I think I’m safe to say we’re back. (Let me know if you still have problems).

Final Update

I’ve successfully set up auto-recovery, for this specific issue at least, so it won’t happen again.

What’s the workaround?

ActiveInbox’s organization system is based entirely on Gmail labels, so you can just use labels to move around.

For example, today is ZD/20241106 (you can find this label in Gmail’s left hand sidebar).

(For reference: ZD/ is a prefix to tell ActiveInbox it’s a date; then it’s formatted as yyyymmdd… so 20241106 is the 6th November 2024.)

You can also add Gmail labels manually, e.g. to set a deadline for tomorrow, add a label for ZD/20241107.

(My many many thanks to Alex commenting with this tip – in my rush to get things fixed I’d forgotten to add it)

ETA on the fix [Now fixed!]

Original 10am GMT

I’m currently investigating, and while I don’t want to tempt fate, I think this will be quick to resolve – possibly even within the next hour (11am GMT). Maybe.

Update at 11:53am

ActiveInbox is actually running again – if you restart Gmail.

The 11am eta had been a little optimistic – it took me until 11:53! But ActiveInbox will now load. I’m not yet ready to declare it fully fixed, as I need to make it auto-recover for this type of problem before I’m fully satisfied. I’m doing that next.

Update at 12:20pm

There’s still a possible issue occurring – will update ASAP when I’ve understood it.

Update at 12:41pm

I think the secondary issue is now also solved. I’m back to working on auto-recovery. Try refreshing Gmail and ActiveInbox should load.

Final update

Auto-recovery is now in place for this specific issue, should it recur.

Andy

Hi everyone,

This is just a very quick update (in between actually trying to figure what’s happening!) to say we know something is wrong with our systems, and we’ve been working to get it back online all morning.

Feel free to write to Lisa or I (support@activeinboxhq.com), but I’ll announce here when we’re back up. (Although forgive me if I don’t respond quickly, as I’m fully in code trying to fix it).

PS To the handful of people who tried to call, I apologise we couldn’t answer earlier. As you might imagine, it’s panic stations here. Lisa is now on top of email and manning the phone (but we probably can’t add any more detail than is posted here… feel free to vent frustration though, I know exactly how serious this is.)

ETA on it being fixed – It’s fixed!

It depends how deep we have to go to find a solution.

Currently we’re looking for a quick fix by attempting to resolve the security certificate issue (mentioned in Update 1). That means it’ll be online in a matter of hours.

If that’s not enough, then we’re going to have to rebuild the server from scratch. That might still be done today, but it could roll into tomorrow… mainly because we have to do tons of integrity checks on your data before committing to anything so major.

Update: It’s requiring a rebuild. I’m about half way through and hopeful it can be done today. (Or rather, I’ll keep going until it’s done… I mean I hope it can be done within most of your business day time zones.)

Update: And 8 hours later, we’re fixed!

Keeping working while it’s down

Thanks to Aaron for reminding me to say this (it’s fair to say my brain is a little fragmented)…

Because ActiveInbox’s organization system is based entirely on Gmail labels, you can just use labels to move around.

For example, if you want to look at items you marked as due today, go to Gmail’s sidebar and load the label ZD/20241007.

(For reference: ZD/ is a prefix to tell ActiveInbox it’s a date; then it’s formatted as yyyymmdd… so 20241007 is the 7th October 2024.)

You can also add Gmail labels manually, e.g. to set a deadline for tomorrow, add a label for ZD/20241008.

What has caused it?

Our hosting platform (Heroku – who for decades have been rock solid, but in the last 2 years have had an increasing number of mishaps) appears to have modified a security certificate with no warning, which stopped our multiple servers from talking to one another.

It’s going to take some time to digest exactly how to deal with this in the future (e.g. moving platforms); but for now I’m still trying to get the server back online. I’ll write a full post mortem when it’s all calmed down.

The updates so far…

Update 1

All signs point to our hosting platform having changed something at 00:00 this morning, which started the problem.

I’m speaking to them but they’re not responding quickly (a separate discussion for when I have more breathing space for a post-mortem); so we’ve also been combing through the systems to try to identify what changed and broke.

I’m homing in on it – it looks like it’s an altered security certificate (that doesn’t mean any of your data is exposed, it just means two or more systems are out of sync and not talking to each other).

Also, because ActiveInbox should work even if it can’t connect to the server – at least for a few days – I regret that this has seemingly instantly disabled ActiveInbox. That’s another investigation for the post-mortem.

Update 2

The attempts to find a quick fix so far haven’t worked.

I’m now looking at rebuilding the server from scratch. I’ll know very quickly if that will resolve the underlying problem – and if it does, I’ll then need several hours to verify that the data will be safely migrated to the new system.

(If you’re wondering why it takes so long… that’s the nature of the beast… but normally I’d have an entire weekend to do this safely while virtually no one is logged in. Doing it on a cold Monday in business hours is a regrettable first!)

Update 3

I’ve managed to confirm that the rebuild is going to work to solve the problem. I’m just moving methodically – especially with your data – to make sure this fairly drastic action goes as smoothly as it can.

In the meantime, see “Keeping working while it’s down” for advice on how you can use deadlines at least.

Update 4 – WE ARE BACK!

What. A. Horrible. Day. But we’re up and running again.

Just refresh Gmail.

I’ll write a post mortem tomorrow, but for now I just need to lay in a dark room.

If any one is in any doubt, I’m really sorry for the downtime. It’s been a manic 8 hours, and I don’t think we’re actually responsible for the root cause (well, we are in the sense we’re still using a platform I’m losing faith in – but I’ll solve that as a next step), but all the time I was incredibly conscious that your workflows were broken and every second counted.

Thank to everyone who wrote in the comments – that gave me a real boost (and Lisa tells me lots of folks were lovely with support too – we feel very grateful for that).

Andy

Please ignore any warning bar today about needing to upgrade. You can just close it and ActiveInbox will work fine.

What happened?

Gmail has recently done a flurry of updates of its own, which occasionally knocks ActiveInbox off balance. (AIB has done surprisingly well over the years at clinging on, the little Gmail urchin that it is, but this was a fairly tectonic shift inside Gmail).

In this case, it led to the Upgrade bar being erroneously exposed.

I promise it’s not just a cynical cash grab

When will it be fixed?

You can just close the bar and everything will work fine. (We intentionally keep the nag bar and actual working features of ActiveInbox separate, just in case of days like this!)

I’ve sent a fixed version of ActiveInbox to Google to be published, so I hope it’ll be automatically with you in 24 hours and we can forget this money-grubbing incident.

Anything else you want to share?

Well, why thank you for asking!

Anyone who has been kind enough (or gung-ho enough) to join me on a call in the last few years knows there’s been a lot of trying to figure out what else I can improve in email, and an arid, tumble-weed-blowing dearth of actual public releases. (Mainly because I was log-jammed with possibilities, but nothing was deafeningly obvious as the best idea to get behind.)

Then AI happened.

For the last few months, a few corporate customers have asked me to help automate/scale their processes with AI, and while I’m about the least corporately-employable person around, I took the jobs as a chance to brainstorm what the possibilities are. And they’re pretty fantastic. (If you ignore the whole Skynet/capitalism-collapsing possibilities… *whistles*).

So now it’s clear… there’s a ton of fascinating ways to make email management, and even better, customer experiences, easy and fast using little AI software assistants.

Ok, enough waffle – you probably want an example… Well, in one little prototype, AI proved fantastic at automatically extracting and drafting Sub Tasks for a long email. Imagine that going further, and it presents you with a morning view of “Here’s your inbox, we’ve grouped it by project and put a summary of the top task in each email – let’s go!”.

Keep your eyes peeled as I’ll be sending email invites for things like this!

Andy here – it’s been 15 years since I started on ActiveInbox, and short while ago, the number of emails in my inbox exploded. So I got a fresh idea to solve it, and thought “Hmm, I know how to make apps, it’ll be fun and this’ll only take a month!”.

That was… 3 years ago. Breef’s journey has NOT been easy.

But I can finally say I’m proud of it. Now it’s just an anxious moment while I see if anyone agrees…

What does Breef do? 

It feels like gardening your inbox – you group emails into bundles, and do the highest impact ones first – and that feels great.

How does it do it?

1. It bundles up your inbox 

It requires 75% less admin work compared to Gmail Labels – you just tell it who to include, and all their emails are grouped!

Or you might say it’s like Gmail Filters, only they’re actually easy to use. 

2. You can skim a bundle in half the time 

The scrolling feed makes triaging your inbox incredibly fast – you can skim through all your emails as quickly as you flick through Instagram.

(And yes, you can add them to ActiveInbox as you go!)

3. Organize your Today list

You can use it to do things like “Break my Today list into my highest impact priorities, such as my boss, top customers, financial news, etc.”.

Can I see it in action? 

Yes! This 2 min video will show you how easily it fits into your workflow:

What will it cost? (Will it be free?)

There will definitely be a forever-free plan, but what will be “premium” is the next thing to figure out. 

I’m going to do a survey next week, after you’ve had a chance to try it, to see what you think is valuable enough to pay for. 

But – spoiler alert – I’m thinking something like “pay to sync bundles between computers”, “pay to use more than X bundles”, “pay to add special bundles, such as emails about your next meeting”, “pay to add more powers, such as showing an unread count on bundles”, or “pay to have nested bundles”. 

Breef’s biggest challenge right now is knowing whether I should continue improving it at all – I’m very open to your feedback. Just email me at andym@getbreef.com 

How can I get try it now? 

Pop over to www.getbreef.com to install the add-on into Chrome – and then refresh Gmail.

Also, make sure you’ve updated ActiveInbox to at least 7.7.10. (It’s easy: just go to your Chrome Extensions list, enable Developer Mode in the top right, then click Update in the top left, and refresh Gmail).

Oh, and there’s a bonus for today!

As a thank you for taking a leap on something new, I’ll gladly give you a month’s free time on whatever “premium” ends up being, if you’re willing to try Breef today (well, technically, let’s say any time before Friday Feb 24th).

Thanks Google. 

There’s a Lite mode! 

A little disclaimer: I don’t think Lite mode will apply to most of you reading this, but you might like it for any personal accounts you have.

I’ve always tried to make ActiveInbox as simple as possible, on the basis that simple is what actually gets used daily. 

The original insight was that the emails are the tasks. You don’t want to create a separate task from an email, and then have to track them both. 

But a few of you have told me that some features are too much for your personal accounts.

So I’ve added the preference to turn off what I’m now calling Pro features, leaving only due dates. (I.e. no Waiting On, no Projects, no Sub Tasks & Notes, no Focus Mode, no Related items). 

Very soon, I’ll be rolling out a Lite payment plan that’s more affordable for personal accounts that don’t need as much power – but do still want the confidence that no important email will be missed. 

If you’ve already tried ActiveInbox on your personal accounts, I’ll be sending you another email shortly to offer another trial.

The Hover Action Bar is easier to use

I’m sure you know that when you’re in the inbox, you can hover over an email and do regular ActiveInbox things like set a due date.

But the bar has always been slightly fiddly to use. It often disappears right when you need it.

So now I’ve made it more stable, at the tiny cost of it taking up more room.

Don’t like it? You can easily switch back to the old way: just go into ActiveInbox Preferences and enable Hide the email’s full toolbar until you mouse over it.

ActiveInbox’s Today list is fixed

I owe a huge thank you to Lloyd Neilson and Prabhjot for being the first to let me know about the bug – and in Lloyd’s case, letting me remotely access his computer to try to figure out a solution. 

If you couldn’t click an email in your ActiveInbox Lists, or you couldn’t mark an email as “I need a reply”, then you were affected. 

Essentially there was a huge change under the hood of Gmail – the thunderous earthquake kind that thankfully only happens every few years – and so on Monday I scrambled to fix ActiveInbox to work with it. It kept revealing more and more tiny breakages – I finally finished at 2am on Tuesday – but it’s all sorted now!

New Task button and Focus Mode is back

These were more minor Gmail changes, and they’re fixed now! 

Dates are much easier to read

When you’re scanning any list in Gmail (even non-ActiveInbox ones like the inbox, sent items, search results, etc.), it’ll now show the Due Date clearly next to the email*.

The hope is it gives you more ways to interact with your due dates, outside of the ActiveInbox lists. 

Also, if you are unlucky enough to still be tracking emails from yesteryear, it now shows the year of the due date. 

(* It'll only do this for future due dates you create. If you want to do it for current due dates, you'll have to go into Gmail's Settings, switch to the Labels tab, and make sure your ZD/ labels are set to "Show in Message List")

It’s cleaner to look at

In recent years, I’ve tried two ideas for ActiveInbox that didn’t work out: Relationships (where you set rules about how quickly you want to reply to different people) and Analytics (where it logs how long you spend on different kinds of emails / people). 

In the end, they felt too complex – and I think that made ActiveInbox feel like a harder product than it actually is. 

They’re both going to become new sibling products to ActiveInbox in time. More on that soon! 

For now, they won’t be cluttering up your Gmail anymore.

Getting it now

The latest version is now 7.7.0. 

Chrome will be automatically updating you over the coming days, but if you want it fixed right now, then:

• Type chrome://extensions into your address bar, and click Enter
• Enable Developer Mode in the top right
• Click Update in the top left
• Refresh Gmail

One more thing…

I redid ActiveInbox’s introduction video. I think it’s always good to revisit these things and make sure you’re getting the full experience!

I’m about share the details (and give a glimpse of life as a software maker!), but first…

Please upgrade to ActiveInbox 7.6.10 (it takes 20 secs)

If you read no further, I strongly encourage you to update to ActiveInbox 7.6.10 now.

I think the problem I’ve found is extremely rare, but if it does occur it could cause trouble for your due dates, and the right thing to do is to ask you to get the fix now.

It’s really easy, just:

• Open your Extensions page (shortcut: open chrome://extensions in a new tab)
• Enable the ‘Developer Mode’ toggle in the top right
• Click the ‘Update’ button in the top left
• Refresh Gmail

And relax!

This dramatic language rather begs the question why doesn’t it? Let me explain…

Gmail has rolled out a couple of updates recently.

This happens periodically, and for the most part, is no big deal.

Until this time.

There are two cases, one of which is urgent.

Case 1: A missing feature

First, the mild-inconvenience case is that ActiveInbox’s “I need a reply” feature may have stopped showing in the Compose popup (because it couldn’t figure out where to insert itself when Gmail moved the furniture around).

This is mostly fixed, but not perfect: on one of my test accounts, it still doesn’t appear until I click the body section of the new email and start typing. I’ll get that fixed too in the next update. (And for customer Jack, it never shows – I’m chatting to him later to fix it.)

Case 2: A risk to due dates

The bad-but-thankfully-extremely-unlikely case for pushing this update is that there is a chance that your due dates might be removed.

The good news is that as far as I know, only 2 people have been affected (1 confirmed, 1 pending), and unless Gmail+ActiveInbox takes more than 60 seconds to start loading on your computer, and you have more than 25 emails on a single due date day, there’s no reason to worry.

But the theoretical vulnerability is still there, and the right thing to do is to ask you to upgrade.

(If you’re worried, you can talk to us at support@activeinboxhq.com)

Let me get nerdy for a moment to fully explain it…

• ActiveInbox uses Gmail Labels to track due dates on emails (in the form of ZD/yyyymmdd, e.g. ZD/20211105 for today).
• When these due date labels are no longer needed – because they’re not on any emails – the labels get cleaned up and removed from Gmail.
• For years I avoided this btw, because I didn’t want ActiveInbox to be able to delete anything. It still can never delete your emails. But eventually, the need to tidy up your environment became worth deleting those unused due date labels.
• As you’d imagine, I put in a lot of safeguards. The most important of which is that just prior to removing the label, after all the other guards, it asks the Google server directly “Are you sure this label is unused?”.
• This final safeguard is the one that has failed in the last week.
• Due to the other safeguards, I think it’s very unlikely you’ll be affected. But it’s still a tiny possibility. And I really really don’t want you to be affected.

Convinced to upgrade? See the steps above.

This update also adds more general safety measures for easier sleeping

Ok, that might be my easier sleeping as much as yours!

When I realised what might be happening, late in the evening yesterday, my body tightened and vision darkened. This is one of those events you never want to occur.

The causes were diagnosed and fixed by around midnight, but it really brought clarity on the need for more ways to handle incidents.

So in addition to fixing the failing safeguard above, I’ve added more:

• A history log of all label changes you make to emails, stored on your machine. It’s a form of backup – so if any due date (or other) ActiveInbox data is lost in the future, we now have a way to restore it.
  
  (Our servers have very strong back up, but Gmail Labels aren’t included because they’re just on your machine and Google’s servers. And I want to keep it that way, as I’m pretty obsessed with privacy – I don’t want your sensitive data on our servers! This new local back up is a good trade off.)
• A way to remotely disable Unused Label Clean Up. I’m keeping it turned off for now, until the dust has settled, and will slowly restore it in coming weeks.

“Hey, man, are you still ok?!”

When we had a few hours of outage last month, I realised I need to start communicating much more often to let you know what’s going on at the office (ok, our homes – it is 2021 after all).

Because more than one person said “I thought you’d flicked a switch and turned off ActiveInbox forever”.

I was like “Wait, we’re up and working every day! Why do you think we’d do that?”. Then I realised I’d clearly been way too quiet.

Short version: ActiveInbox is profitable, healthy, has been going for 15 years, and I love that it helps people every day. Lisa still supports customers throughout each day, and I step in to help fix bugs and handle Gmail changes.

But something has changed in the way I work…

ActiveInbox now has siblings: Breef & Project Formz

I explained last year why it’s unlikely that ActiveInbox will get any more new features: with 1000s of customers, and already being quite a feature-full product, the changes I introduce often annoyed some segment of users as much as it pleased others.

So I spun new ideas into separate products, that you could try only if you really wished.

Breef makes use of the knowledge flowing through your inbox

If you’re struggling with a lot of unread emails, and fear missing the great insights in them, I think you’ll love Breef.

It makes your inbox as fast as Instagram, by adding the same infinite scroll technology to glide through emails. Use it to skim and see what catches your eye, or to triage your inbox into tasks faster.

It’s other super cool feature is…

Because we tend to psychologically avoid “massive piles of stuff“, it also has a really neat “5 Minute Catch Up” feature that, for any view in Gmail, surfaces the best emails you’ve missed. It even learns your taste over time!

^^ This video is just 1 minute, and does a great job of helping feel what Breef is about.

You can try it from https://www.getbreef.com (it’s free during beta, but will have paid plans later).

Project Formz reimagines “I need a reply” so you never have to chase people

This is super early stage:

• I’m still working on the Proof of Concept for this.
• It’s only for heavy business users who spend a lot of time interacting with people outside their immediate team (especially in other departments or companies).

But it came from a mental challenge I gave myself of “what would it look like if ActiveInbox was just its Waiting On feature (and no more)?”, partly because in customer conversations, you’ve all told me chasing is the true pain.

I realised that the act of tracking & chasing replies is a band-aid. A wasteful crutch.

It doesn’t solve the root cause of why we’re chasing in the first place.

Well, it turns out we chase because our recipients are overwhelmed. Their inbox is on fire. They lose track of us. Or ignore us for ages until they’re ready. But that leaves us hanging and blocked.

I think an act of kindness that ripples outwards is the answer: make it much easier for them to reply (and track things together if they can’t right now).

It’s really a simpler, kinder, more collaborative ActiveInbox.

If this sounds interesting, and you’d value it enough to pay a refundable $100 to be part of, and have a voice in, the beta, please email me: andym@activeinboxhq.com . (It’s a lot I know, but at first I really want to work with a handful of highly time-conscious professionals.)

Otherwise hang tight – I’ll talk more about it next year!