Today, Mailbox users who hadn’t been paying attention will wake up to find that their email client of choice no longer exists. Don’t worry! We’re here to help you through this difficult time.
When Dropbox bought Mailbox in March of 2013, there was every reason to expect a harmonious future. The email client represented $100 million acquisition for the cloud storage company, and an exciting opportunity to expand beyond its core business. Their names even ended the same!
Three years later, Mailbox is dead, a victim of its parent company’s renewed focus “on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together,” and a challenging business environment. While the company announced the closure in December, it doesn’t actually go into effect until today.
It’s a dramatic turn of fortune for an app that once had a waiting list nearly seven-figures deep. But the past is the past! The question now is, where to? The good news is, you’ve got no shortage of options. Here’s where to start.
Don’t let the name fool you; Microsoft does email better than just about anybody these days. You can funnel multiple accounts into it (just link it to your Gmail address and you're golden), clean up your inbox with left and right swipes, and use smart filters to get to what’s important faster. It’s clean, well-designed, and most of all reliable.
A relatively new player, Spark integrates with Dropbox, Pocket, Google Drive, and more. Not only can you swipe every which way, you can also customize what each of those swipes does. Spark’s also got a surprisingly useful Apple Watch implementation, if you insist on checking your wristmail. Also, former Mailbox user, Spark actively wants your business! Its creator, Readdle, wrote a lengthy post trying to convince you to switch teams right after Mailbox announced its imminent croaking. Just be aware that there’s no desktop or Android client—yet.
If you want a fully customizable experience that’s optimized for all of iOS 9’s peeps and pops, Airmail may be your best option. At five bucks, it’s more expensive than the “free” that most other email clients are going for these days, but you can’t put a price on granular control. Or actually, in this case I guess they did. Fair warning for fans of the Mailbox’s minimalism: This is about as maximal as an email app gets. It's on desktop and iOS, but not Android.
Inbox, Google’s crack at fixing email, works to simplify your life by dumping your incoming messages into “bundles,” sorted by either pre-existing labels (“Promos,” “Social,” “Purchases,” etc.) or custom groupings of your choosing. Better still, it will surface relevant information from certain types of messages—say, your flight times, from a travel confirmation—to the top of a given email. It’s a lot of small time-savers that add up to fewer minutes staring at a screen, the way Mailbox would have wanted.
Ol’ faithful. You know Gmail, you use Gmail, you like Gmail enough. But you know what? The app works. Really well, most of the time! And honestly, oftentimes the more you try to fine-tune your email life, the more frustrating it becomes. There’s something to be said for just embracing the firehose and letting the SPAM filter sort things out.
Really, you can’t go wrong. It’s email, not advanced thermodynamics. Oh, except for the iOS Mail app. Avoid that one like the plague.
