Mailbox is an email client for Gmail and iCloud that changes the way you manage your emails by keeping your inbox, message labels, and everything else in order.
A task manager within your emails
The philosophy behind Mailbox is similar to that of a task manager, where each email you receive is an outstanding action. Each message you get requires you to take an action relating to it: you can read the message, archive it, or go back to it later.
As soon as you start using Mailbox, it will automatically create folders in your Gmail or iCloud inbox for all of those items that you want to read later or archive into subcategories.
There's also an option so that you can set selected emails to 'snooze', so they reappear in your Inbox at a scheduled point, from a few minutes later until the following week.
Of course, Mailbox also lets you make the most of everyday actions such as replying to and forwarding emails, adding attachments and customizing your signature. There's no option for saving emails as drafts, unfortunately.
A key limitation of Mailbox for Android is that it only supports
Scroll through all available actions
Mailbox offers many possibilities, but at present, there are only a few buttons on the screen. Where's the difference then? It's in the swipe gestures that you make to manage your inbox.
There are two possible gestures for swiping left to right: if you swipe a little way right with your finger, it will archive the message, and if you swipe your finger all the way to the right, it erases the messages. Swipe gestures from right to left let you postpone the message with a short swipe, and send the message to a custom folder with a long swipe.
This method of email management may seem complicated at first glance, but Mailbox does include a complete interactive tutorial that helps make the change less drastic and easier to manage. That said, with a little bit of practice, you'll forget what you did without it.
What's not intuitive is the fact that Mailbox forces you to empty your Inbox folder, archiving the mail that you've already read.
If you're one of those people who like to have their inbox full of hundreds of emails, this might seem a little scary at first, but rest assured, at no point will you actually lose your messages.
The Mailbox app is not optimized for Android tablets, unfortunately. This is a shame because its clean interface and gesture-based functionality would be ideally suited to the larger form factor.
During my tests with version 1.0.1.4 of Mailbox, I found some issues with the reliability of email notifications in Android. At times, notifications were taking a long time to appear, other times I didn't receive notifications of new mail at all.
Useful - once you get the hang of it!
Mailbox is much more than an email client: it's a different way of adressing emails. According to it's developers, it's the most consistent way to manage mail for those people who receive hundreds of messages a day. To a certain extent, it forces you to adapt to a new way of looking at things and perhaps not everyone will be willing to accept it.
Download Mailbox 1.1.1.2 in Softonic