Right now there are approximately three-quarters of a million people waiting to use Mailbox. Mailbox is a mobile iOS app designed to help you “fly through your email” and easily sort incoming messages. Read them, archive them, move the hell on.
The developer is rolling out the app slowly via a reservation system, to make sure everything scales well. It's also a great marketing tactic. People are talking about Mailbox, even tweeting photos of their place in line. There are more than 750,000 people already waiting, and more lining up every day, for an app that promises to put e-mail in its place. Lines are a great problem. But people are waiting because of scarcity, not success. Despite the hype, it won’t save you from e-mail.
Mailbox does make it easier to sort through the messages that land in your inbox. You can archive them, delete them, save them to read later, or add them to a list. The "save for later" function is the most talked about; it will hide and then re-deliver a message at whatever later point in time you choose. All those things are helpful for on-the-go sorting. It's a cool process.
And a digital line of nearly a million people waiting for Mailbox is meaningful. (And keep in mind those are all Gmail-on-iPhone users.) That line means e-mail is deeply broken and very many people think of it as a never-ending chore. A kick in the gut every morning. But the Mailbox line is about curiosity. It's there because it's easy -- you don't have to pay anything or devote any time. The line doesn’t mean Mailbox has fixed e-mail. It doesn’t mean that its techniques for cleaning out your inbox will make you more organized. It doesn’t even mean that it’s a good idea for everyone.
Mailbox seems more suited to clean starts than cleaning up. It won’t work with anything other than Gmail on iOS. It won’t show you all your mail, only what's in the inbox right now. It won’t show you the mail in your existing folders, or send new incoming mail to those folders (which is a problem if you already filter your mail).
One of Mailbox's boldface selling points is that it gets you to inbox zero and keeps you there. OK, but look: Inbox zero is just a construct. It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t have a clean inbox -- what matters is that you act on your incoming mail as necessary. Inbox zero is simply an organizational technique to help you accomplish the things you really need to. It is not the end goal; it's simply a process. Too many people conflate the process of inbox zero with the goal of being more productive.
Sure, Mailbox makes getting to inbox zero easier. But after spending a few days with it, I’m not sure that it actually makes me faster or more productive at reading and responding to e-mail. It imposes a rigid system on me that doesn’t do everything I need it to, so I end up opening other e-mail apps anyway. That means I'm ultimately spending even more time than I already was on e-mail. I hate e-mail.
Mailbox will be great for some people. But it doesn't reinvent email; it just automates a process that may not work for you. Mailbox is simply a tool. A very nice one, a well-designed one. I like it. But it's just a tool and a blunt one at that. No app will save you from e-mail. You can't swipe and sort your way to a better you, no matter how long the line is.
