Mailbox Is Nothing New

14 Feb 2013

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a video ad for an email program that can be run on an iPhone. I Googled this Mailbox “app” to find out more about it. The press seems to be extremely excited for this thing, but I honestly don’t see why.

Their home page is filled with modern web clichés: lots of white space, a huge 1,000-pixel vertical length video, and short paragraphs describing their product.

We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button.

I don’t understand exactly how they “redesigned the inbox”. It looks nearly identical to the Gmail application. It even has the same swipe-to-archive functionality. Chat-like organization? Oh, they mean Gmail’s conversation view.

Designed 30 years ago, traditional email transmission is clunky and slow. To make delivery as fast as possible, Mailbox checks your email from the cloud, then delivers it to your phone securely. You can even get push notifications for new messages.

This one made me laugh. Email is just text, so I have no idea what they mean by it being clunky and slow. I’m also a bit confused by their claim that they speed up delivery by “checking email from the cloud”. Where the hell else are you going to check email from?

Stop staring at emails you can’t deal with now. Mailbox lets you put off messages until later with a swipe and a tap. Snoozed emails return to your inbox automatically, so you can focus on what’s important now.

Isn’t this called “flag for follow-up” in most other email clients?

When your inbox holds just the stuff you need to address now, email feels lighter and faster. Mailbox makes getting to zero — and staying there — a breeze. After you experience a clean inbox, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

This one is really up to the user, I think. Many people simply don’t like deleting emails so they can search for attachments and other information. Personally, I keep a clean inbox.

At the very bottom of the page I’m supposed to get in line and wait for them to allow me to use their program. As if it was some huge privilege and some exclusive group. No, thanks.