Dropbox Acquires Email App Mailbox

While thousands of people still wait for their personal invitation to the new iPhone email application Mailbox, Dropbox simply cut in line. Actually, Dropbox took over the line, and the app, announcing today that it has acquired Mailbox.

"Like many of you, when we discovered Mailbox we fell in love," Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi wrote in a blog post. "It was simple, delightful, and beautifully engineered. Many have promised to help us with our overflowing inboxes, but the Mailbox team actually delivered."

The Gmail-compatible iPhone app launched last month to great fanfare, and is now delivering more than 60 million emails a day.

This acquisition doesn't mean that Mailbox will be slowing down. In fact, Dropbox will help push the company forward, allowing it to add more email providers and mobile devices, as well as other new features, including enhanced email attachments, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Mailbox app was released by Orchestra in February, with high hopes for revamping the process of reviewing, writing, and responding to modern email. Functioning as a sort of to-do list for your electronic messages, users can swipe across a message to archive or delete, read an entire conversation in one swoop with a chat-like layout, or snooze emails until later.

Access to the app became available on a first-come, first-served reservation basis, which had hundreds of thousands of people constantly checking their place in the digital line, which topped 300,000 by the end of its first day in the Apple App Store.

The team has been focused this month on ramping up its service and scaling its new infrastructure. But rather than grow the app on its own, the company said, "we've decided to join forces with Dropbox and build it together."

All 14 Mailbox employees will stay put, promised Mailbox. Dropbox said both companies pride themselves on making life easier, be it through file storage or email organization.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For more, see PCMag's Getting Organized: How to Avoid Email Overload. Also, check out Mailbox in action in the company's video below.