There was a total revamp to GMail called "Inbox" that Google was working on for a while, but it got deprecated and cancelled before it was released. From what I heard, they were testing it internally and most people liked it. It just was more search focused so the backend costs were more than they thought they could bear and it was scrapped.
I loved Inbox, it was way better at organizing than gmail. In true google fashion, as soon as people started to like it and use it, they unceremoniously killed it.
