Google Inbox?

Ryan Goldstein, a reader of this blog, noticed a new addition to Gmail's SSL certificate: a reference to inbox.google.com in the Subject Alternative Name field. Subject Alternative Names allows you to secure multiple host names with a single SSL certificate.

When visiting inbox.google.com, Google redirects to https://inbox.google.com/?pli=1 and returns a 403 Forbidden error message. This suggests that the site exists, but it's not yet publicly available.

It's not clear if inbox.google.com will be a used for a new Gmail interface, a different service that uses Gmail data, a mail client or something else.

Update: There's a Chromium bug report about "Inbox (BigTop) desktop freezing in Chrome Canary".

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Navigate to inbox.google.com
2. Click on any email message to expand the message

What is the expected result?
Email message expands to show full text of most recent email in the thread, as well as number of other emails in the thread.

What happens instead?
No activity. Inbox application appears frozen. Cursor remains small hand with pointed finger.

Update 2: Mihai Parparita spotted other references to BigTop in Chrome's bug tracker: "I clicked on it from my corp Bigtop account. I was signed in to Mirror with my personal account as the sync account." There are also many reference to inbox_app.

Update 3: Android Police reports that the Gmail app for Android will handle email accounts from Outlook, Yahoo Mail and other email providers. You can already use Gmail's mail fetcher, but the new feature will work better and Google will be able to replace the Android Mail app with Gmail. Maybe this has something to do with Google Inbox?

Update 4: The service is now available.

{ Thanks, Ryan. }