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Anything promising to simplify a ubiquitous, and often frustrating, activity—like email—is sure to have people salivating. For the new iOS app Mailbox, this promise was effectively hyped with the help of a lovely video back in December. The app has finally dropped, and you know what? It might just live up to the hype.
An iOS app that helps you more effectively read and sort messages in your Gmail account.
People who are overwhelmed by the traditional workflow of letting email pile up in your inbox.
In a word, Mailbox is—elegant. Everything is laid out with simple and clear visual cues.
The app is structured around the concept of keeping your inbox at zero. Every message you read gets re-located. After reading a new message, you use swipe gestures to send it to one of 4 places—you can archive it, delete it, categorize it in a pre-defined list, or have it re-appear later with a timed reminder. The ease of Mailbox’s swiping scheme is at the heart of the experience. It fuses reading a message with sorting it, eliminating extra steps that inevitably are neglected, leading to an immense stack of undifferentiated slop.
That is pretty much the entirety of the Mailbox experience.
If you were looking for a robust, feature-rich workhorse of an app, time to pump them brakes. Mailbox isn’t meant to fill the gaps in other iOS mail apps. Its purpose is pedagogical, to re-condition you into a more direct and streamlined way of working with email. The app even lacks a few abilities that you would think no modern mail app would dare omit. You can’t select multiple messages and file them away at once (though you can choose to file ALL your messages away in one swipe). You can’t mark messages as spam. You can’t save drafts. These are best not seen as omissions, but as choices. Mailbox is a strict parent teaching you to behave, and you will either thank them later, or rebel by breaking curfew and smoking pot in the school parking lot.
Mailbox offers something new, and is bold in its quest. The app is fast and light and fun to use.
Even though Mailbox is live in the App Store, you might find yourself having to wait a while before actually being able to use it. In order to prevent their servers from being overloaded, Mailbox is actually being rolled out to users gradually. In the app you will find a counter of people ahead of you and behind you in the count. It’s a strange way of doing things, and will annoy the impatient.
Sorting mail using Mailbox on the iPhone is all well and good, but what about when you go to use Gmail your laptop? It is up to you to try and duplicate the sorting scheme that Mailbox has created. Upon visiting Gmail, you will find that Mailbox has created folders for you, but of course you can’t just swipe each new message away. It’s more cumbersome, and trying to follow the two workflows could disrupt the simple elegance of Mailbox.
- The app only works with Gmail accounts.
- Options for “snooze” settings are limited. You can’t create custom alarms outside of “start my day at,” “start my weekends at,” end my workday at,” “later today,” and “someday.”
- When I downloaded Mailbox, there were about 50,000 users in front of me, and it took about 4 days until I was granted access.
Well, it’s free, so yes. You’ve got nothing to lose.
In many ways, Mailbox is an app that falls right in line with the Apple philosophy. Show you an easier way, simplify your experience, and deny you the ability to transgress. It’s an approach that makes many users fume with resentment, and is a saving grace for countless others. But in the end software can only go so far to condition behavior. It’s up to you to stay organized, no matter how much Mailbox greases the rails.
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I downloaded this app from the last GIZ post about it, Thinking it would be really good. However, that was nearly a week ago now, and my queue number started somewhere at 530,000 and has gone down to 393,417.
It is strangely satisfying to watch the number go down, And see the people behind you too. But, I didn’t know that this app was *only* for gmail, and also create’s folders in your gmail account too? That will really piss me off. However, I don’t give a crap about my gmail account so I will give it ago. I hardly ever use the thing.
But I thought this was going to replace my mail app on my phone, but clearly not. Which is quite annoying because it has a nice icon, and a nice ethos. If it just did what it claimed to do and kept all it’s activity confined to the phone, then It would be very good I think. I don’t care about what my mailbox *really* look’s like, I just want to be able to sort it on my phone quickly.
Same here. I was hoping this would replace the standard default email app that comes with my i-device. I don’t use Gmail enough but may have to change that.
Is it going to cater for POP email accounts at some point?
Looks quite cool but cant be arsed to clean my gmail up haha
I’ve been using it since the weekend and can genuinely say it is brilliant.
Yes it creates “folders” in your gmail account (they are just labels anyway) but they are hardly an issue especially when the goal is to create inbox zero each day. When I do look at my email through Gmail in my browser all I do is deal with the email and archive it (as in done) and let Mailbox deal with the other messages when I get a chance.
Best feature for me is waking up in the morning and having the selection of emails that I have to deal with that day right there at the top of my inbox and ready to go. Best to do list I’ve had and it feels like it will be sustainable unlike todo lists for me.
I have a lot of time for the concept and intuitive design but as the reviewer states it really can’t be considered a true replacement for Gmail/iOS Mail App. In fact after two days I’ve decided to re-download the gmail app as I found my workflow being severely limited.
Two pet peeves niggled most. First the inability to check multiple messages to sort and even to star from the mailbox (you can if you are reading the message). Secondly and more pressing was that the search function is very limited only turning up results from the past week or two, obviously not much use when you are hunting for old messages.
If they can fix these then they’ll be onto a winner.
That is a sublimely smooth gif
hasn’t android had this as standard in the Gmail app for a while? where was the news story then?
When a standard Android feature is tweaked slightly and released to iproducts it’s magical and revolutionary. You must be new here
haha so true love it!