Mailbox (for iPad) Review

An overflowing email inbox can feel like a weight on your shoulders. The email management system app Mailbox, by Orchestra Inc., originally debuted on the iPhone to much hype and demand. It promised a solution, a series of set actions that encouraged users to do something with every message that entered their inbox. When the app initially launched, Orchestra put guards at the gate and limited access to only a few thousand users at a time, with a long waiting list for anyone else who wanted to get their hands on the app. Now, with a few months' experience, Orchestra has opened the floodgates and in addition upgraded the app to spread across the full screen size of iPads and iPad minis($399.00 at Amazon). (Mailbox co-founder Gentry Underwood is a fan of the mini in particular.) The Mailbox iPad app is a straightforward port of the original, which is excellent news for those who have found it useful. Not everyone will, though, so it's important to know just how Mailbox aims to solve your email woes before you get sucked into using it as a primary solution for email management.

How to Get Mailbox for iPad
While the waiting list for Mailbox is now a thing of the past, it did take me a moment to realize the Mailbox iPad app doesn't actually show up under list of iPad apps in the Apple App Store. I downloaded the copy I found listed under iPhone apps, and heaved a sigh of relief upon installing it when I saw it was in fact the full-sized version.

Mailbox Philosophy and Gestures
Mailbox largely adheres to the Inbox Zero philosophy, which loosely states that an ideal inbox has zero messages in it by the time you close it. (As an aside, the creator of Inbox Zero, Merlin Mann, told me in an email conversation recently that Inbox Zero is not about having zero messages at all costs. It's more about having an inbox that doesn't overwhelm you and contains a reasonable amount of information to process and digest.) At the heart of the philosophy is the idea that when you look at email messages, you should do something with them, such as respond, file away, archive, delete, or push them off until later.

Mailbox's implementation of this concept is to give iPad users simple gestures for these actions. A long swipe to the right deletes a message, but a short swipe to the right marks a message as having been completed (so it can be archived). A short swipe to the left snoozes a message, and you can mark when it should reappear in your inbox, while a long left swipe files the message into the folder of your choice.

Mailbox only works with Gmail at the moment, which is a show stopper for a lot of people hoping to use the app for business email processing, particularly when they're on the road and merely need to stay on top of the inbox influx. You can, however, add multiple Gmail accounts, just not email from any other host. The app automatically sets up a few folders ("tags" in Gmail) for you—To Read, To Watch, To Buy, and Later—which you'll see the next time you log into Gmail proper nested inside a new "Mailbox" folder/tag.

Why Mailbox Isn't for Everyone
While Mailbox certainly does appeal to people who don't know how to process email and often feel overloaded by it, it's not a great solution for those who already deal with email pretty effectively. One problem is you can't select multiple messages at a time to process in bulk. I'm a rampant deleter, and the inability to delete six, seven, eight, fifteen messages at a shot completely destroys my productivity practices. You can do any of the swipe actions for your entire inbox by scrolling to the very bottom, but you can't hand-pick which messages to include or not include.

The layout of the iPad app takes advantage of the larger screen well, although it doesn't work in portrait orientation (only landscape on the iPad, although the opposite is true on the iPhone). If you like the Mailbox experience on the iPhone, it's definitely worth installing on an iPad, too. Having a consistent way to process email across those two platforms is a step in the right direction. Without support for other email hosting services, though, or the ability to process messages in bulk, Mailbox for iPad's appeal remains somewhat limited.