• Is ActiveInbox for me?

  If you have ever forgotten an email, procrastinated about processing your emails, or felt overwhelmed by your inbox; ActiveInbox will give you the sense of easy control that helps you glide through your email.

• Is ActiveInbox designed for individuals or for businesses?

  Both. ActiveInbox works within your individual email account, and helps you manage the flow of tasks that emails represent. However, email is obviously highly collaborative, and everyone in an organization benefits when each member has ActiveInbox increasing their email effectiveness.

  Taking a wide view of the landscape, Basex has quantified emails as a $650 billion drag on the economy, and we believe - as do our customers - that if every individual was more productive with their email, the global business world would be more efficient as a result.

• I'm only interested in a handful of ActiveInbox features, can I disable the rest?

  Yes, all features are configurable by the user.

• Can I trust ActiveInbox in Gmail?

  Yes, ActiveInbox has been in public use since 2006 and is even used by individuals within Google.

  We do not require you to enter or store your Gmail login credentials, it simply works within Gmail.

  Our Plus version does store some data on our servers, but only what you agree to submit. We do not see any of your emails or other personal information.

• What is so unique about the way ActiveInbox manages my emails?

  ActiveInbox looks at email differently. The old metaphor of an exchange of letters is no longer realistic for modern email use, when email has become a "habitat" - the central place where work is received, managed and delegated in organizations. ActiveInbox introduces a new metaphor: emails are a flow of badly formatted tasks passing through our inboxes and between the people who work with us. All of ActiveInbox's features are designed to support this way of thinking.

• So ActiveInbox is another task manager?

  No, it is an email manager . It works well with your existing task managers, taking care of the unique nature of emails - which are fast flowing, small and ill formed - in Gmail, therefore leaving your general task manager (if you still need one!) uncluttered and free to focus on the big picture. Crucially, there is no new and separate system for you to set up and maintain, ActiveInbox streamlines your email handling entirely within Gmail.

• What is the best way to use ActiveInbox?

  Check out our ActiveInbox Workflow Guide for a Better Gmail.

Troubleshooting

• The ActiveInbox Sidebar tells me it is unable to load

  1. First, refresh your Gmail. This often takes care of any problems.
  2. Next, check to make sure your cookies are permitted for Gmail.
  3. In Firefox, go to Options/Preferences (for Firefox, not ActiveInbox), and switch to the 'Privacy' tab.
     1. In Firefox 3.5 and later, ensure that either you have selected 'Remember History', or if you want to be more selective, choose 'Use Custom Settings for History', and ensure both 'Accept Cookies from Sites' and 'Accept third-party cookies' are checked/enabled. If you have them unchecked for security reasons, please enable them just for Gmail, by clicking 'Exceptions', entering 'mail.google.com' into the 'Address of web site' textbox, and clicking 'Allow'.
        It could look something like this:
        
     2. Alternatively, if you use Firefox 3.1 or earlier, ensure that both "Accept cookies from sites" and "Accept third-party cookies" are checked (enabled). If you have them unchecked for security reasons, please enable them for Gmail, by clicking 'Exceptions', entering 'mail.google.com' into the 'Address of web site' textbox, and clicking 'Enable'.

        It should look something like this:
        

  If that fails, please contact us at the Community Forum.

• The ActiveInbox Sidebar is telling me that it could not properly read the Conversation data

  Please contact us at the Community Forum and we'll diagnose it with you.

• When I click the "Setup" button on the ActiveInbox Sidebar nothing happens

  This mostly affects Linux users. Please just install the Status labels (e.g. S/Action, S/Waiting On, S/Some Day and S/Finished) manually by going to Gmail's Settings, selecting the Labels tab, and adding them. The setup button should now work.

• Why do lots of features disappear in Gmail's offline mode?

  We're working on full offline support. Currently, when you enter 'Unstable/Flakey Connection' mode in Gmail, certain ActiveInbox features disappear. However, we try to keep core features (such as action and project labeling) available 100% of the time.

• ActiveInbox has stopped working, what do I do?

  If you are a new user, you may be able to fix this with a few tricks.

  1. First, try refreshing Gmail.
  2. Second, close and reopen FireFox.
  3. If those don't work, please contact us at the Community Forum.

  If ActiveInbox has been working for you but has suddenly stopped working or is behaving oddly, a previously undiscovered software bug (including a Gmail update) may be causing the problem. Please report it on the Community Forum.

  In most cases, it will help immensely to know if any errors are appearing in FireFox's Error Console. You can use standard Firefox tools to find out:

  1. Close Gmail tabs
  2. Open Firefox's Error Console (in the Tools menu)
  3. In the Error Console, move to the 'Messages' tab/button
  4. Click Clear to clear the Messages list
  5. Go back to the Firefox window, and open Gmail (and log in)
  6. Switch back to the Messages list in Error Console. You should start seeing debugging information from ActiveInbox.

  In normal circumstances, there will be a lot of messages (if there's none, then it might not even be loading at all - very unusual). Fortunately, there is only one type of thing you need to look for (and if it's crashing, there will be much less debugging output as it will stop after the error).

  An error will be on multiple lines (and one of the only messages that is), and it will have line numbers and stack trace information. This should make it easy to spot in a quick scan.

  An example is:

  Error in glNavBar: Could not find mainBucketsContainer nodeStack trace:Exception thrown("Could not find mainBucketsContainer node","glNavBar")@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/util/debug.js:110([object Object])@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/gmail/ui/glNavBar.js:73

  If you see anything like this, please include it in your message on the forum. If this seems bewildering and overwhelming, just contact us at the Community Forum and we will take care of you.

Configuring

• How do I remove ActiveInbox?

  In Firefox, click the Tools menu, then Addons - a window will pop up - now select ActiveInbox and click Uninstall.

  In Chrome, click the Window menu, then Extensions - a new tab will load - now select ActiveInbox and click Uninstall.

  To complete it, you may wish to clean up Gmail by removing ActiveInbox specific labels (e.g. S/Action).

Misc

• Can I use ActiveInbox via IMAP?

  Yes, we use IMAP-friendly prefixes on the labels, so they'll show up as folders in your IMAP software (e.g. P/ActiveInbox would be a 'ActiveInbox' subfolder within the 'P' folder).