Tell me if this sounds familiar. You go on vacation and you come back to a VERY full inbox. As you are whittling away email after email, it seems like for every email you answer, to more show up in your inbox. Wouldn’t it be nice to put a hold on all of your incoming emails while you take care of stuff already there? That’s precisely what Inbox Pause does for you.
Inbox Pause only works with Gmail and is made by the same folks who brought you the Boomerang Gmail extension.
How to pause your inbox
The first thing you need to do is download the Inbox Pause extension for Google Chrome. You can get if from the Inbox Pause website.
Once the Google Chrome extension is installed and the page refreshes, the only real change you’ll see is the pause button just above the compose button in the left sidebar.
When you press the pause button for the first time, you’ll be asked to grant permissions to the extension. This permission lets Inbox Pause tinker with your Gmail account a little.
Pausing your inbox
Using Inbox Pause is quite easy. When you need a break from your incoming email, all you need to do is press the pause button. When you pause your email, you won’t see an email in this account anywhere. That’s right. If you have a mobile device such as an Android where the email is instantly pushed out to the device, this is also paused. This means, if you need a little time away from your email, you get the silence everywhere.
Each time you pause your email, you’ll be asked if you want to use an auto-reply. This auto reply is pretty much the same as what you would use for a vacation response or canned response in Gmail. You can modify the outgoing email say whatever you like.
Where the emails go
When you press the pause button, all of the incoming messages are placed into a label specific for that day. Here is an example of what the label will look like.
From time to time you may be waiting on an email while it’s paused. If this is the case, you can go into your labels and see all of the emails waiting on hold for you to press the unpause button. When you are ready to start receiving your email again, all you will have to do is click the unpause button.
When the Gmail account is unpaused, all of the emails on hold will be sent to the inbox with the original time stamp just as if they came in regularly.
Final thoughts
Having a simple way to pause your email can create a great way to have a little silence. The fact that Inbox Pause stops the emails at the source by not letting the message into your inbox and therefore doesn’t get pushed to all of your other devices is ideal.
Download Inbox Pause.
