Seven months after it first previewed Inbox, Google announced today at its I/O developer conference that the app is now open to anyone with a Gmail or Google Apps account. (Google also announced that there are now 900 million Gmail users, as the service continues to solidify its place as the only email account worth having.) The company's fascinating vision for what it calls "the inbox for the next 10 years" is finally available to everyone.

Inbox is a funny thing: It's a new kind of email client, built to work around the way we actually use email. Which is, well, poorly. We let our email stack up and guilt us; we let messages get in the way of things we actually need to do. Inbox doesn't try to curb that, it just tries to help you manage it all a little better—it essentially turns your inbox into a to-do list. Absolutely, email notes and reminders to yourself! And here, we'll categorize and sort them and make sure you see everything exactly when and where you need to.

Google

As it opens to everyone, Inbox is getting a few key upgrades. A new feature called "Trip Bundles" sorts through all your confirmation and booking emails, automatically creating an itinerary and dossier of relevant information for your trip. Any reminders you create will be accessible in Google Keep and Google Now, and vice-versa. And it's using some deep-linking to let you go straight into apps directly from your email instead of heading to the website. Perhaps best of all, Inbox will go through your emails and hunt for tasks—and it'll prompt you to add them as specific reminders.

One other addition is less "mission-centric," yet still awesome: You can now use Gmail's Undo Send feature in Inbox, and you can use it on your phone. This feature has kept me, for one, from getting dumped, fired, incarcerated... you get the idea. It's a big get.

Google

Alex Gawley, Google's director of product management for Gmail and Inbox, says these changes are all part of the same goal: turn your email inbox into something much more useful. "We want to be helping people really understand their inbox as the set of things they need to get back to and do," he says, "rather than a table of contents for things you need to dig through."

Inbox was created as a wholly separate project from Gmail because it was an experiment. Gawley and his team saw that email was a mishmash of true communication, tasks, demands, as well as all the confirmation letters, newsletters, and vague sex-related spam everyone gets every day. Inbox's job is to figure out what matters in all that, and "do as much of that work as we can for people," Gawley says.

Inbox is a dramatically different service—Gmail tries to get you in and out, but Inbox wants you to stick around, to use it to organize anything and everything. If you feel like you spend your life constantly digging out of a never-ending email hole, Inbox might feel like a much-needed lifeline. And now you can finally try it.